The 30 Best Productivity Tools for Business & Work
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Looking for the best productivity tools to improve productivity for yourself and your team? Today we’ll have a look at the best tools available for different use cases.
What does productivity mean to you? We’re all expert procrastinators whether we like to admit it or not. The digital age has created an abundance of distractions. Even the subject of productivity tools comes down to a single factor. It’s all designed for mental discipline training. Tools are only as good as the users.
But, it does help to motivate yourself. And using different types of productivity tools to find the right one for you. Lists are a good example of how to train the mind. If need be– prioritize the most important ones (often the ones that are most difficult) could help you get more done in less time.
This isn’t our first time writing about productivity, we wrote several posts on the subject:
This is going to be our first post about tools related directly to business and work-related tasks. The areas in which productivity can provide significant gains in your revenue and general happiness about your work. The mind can trick us into thinking that we have it all under control. There’s a lot of information there, but it’s hard to connect the dots. So, why give yourself a hard time? Why not employ some of these amazing tools?
We will cover bookmarking tools, general content dashboards to organize your business world, a number of great apps for creating lists, and a selection of business-related tools that you’d need to use in daily workflow anyway — for example, why to resort to manual keyword research when you can automatically scan all of your competitors with a single click; productivity comes in different shapes and forms, and we hope to cover the majority of them here.
Without further ado let’s have a look at the best productivity tools you can get your hands on.
The Best Productivity Tools
Todoist Productivity Tool
Todoist runs a well-off company that provides to-do list solutions for both desktop and mobile users. Write them on your desktop computer, and access them from your tablet or smartphone device; that easy! If you’re doing family trips or have a work-related schedule. Why not use Todoist’s collaboration features to invite others to join your list? Putting two minds together is always a better way of finding the right angle towards a solution. The user interface is sleek, with modern features, yet remains utterly minimalistic. The kind of thing that you need when it comes to lists. You can schedule and reorganize any tasks at your hand. Get notifications for them when the time has come to work on something important.
Through a comments widget, you can expand on a single idea and add any additional information. Including documents and photos that could help to polish the idea in a more refined fashion. For premium users, there’s a feature that allows Todoist users to add custom labels and filters to their lists so that it becomes easier to navigate the things that you’ve accomplished and stuff that you’ve yet to do.
Evernote
Lists are great, they help to organize your thoughts and they provide a solid outline of what’s happening in your life, but what if lists aren’t enough to conclude your most important things in life? Sure, traditional diary writing is a viable option, but as a business person or someone who has many tasks at hand. You need something effective, digital and efficient.
Evernote is a world-class information management platform used by bloggers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and everyday ordinary people to better understand themselves, and their projects. Whether your plan is to brainstorm ideas with co-workers, to take notes of creative ideas, or simply collect feedback on a particular subject, Evernote gives you the right set of tools to get the job done, professionally! Write inspirational notes during nighttime, and follow back on them the next day using your smartphone — it’s fully compatible with any modern device that has access to a web browser, or the most popular mobile app stores.
Evernote is known for catering to the business sector, by providing a concise business platform where workers can collaborate, brainstorm, and work together on any given issues. The in-built tools for finding and archiving content will never make you want to switch back to the traditional way of keeping your notes.
Trello
With two excellent choices already on the list, what could Trello possibly add to your experience if not a distraction? Well, Trello’s approach is different. It’s a board-style productivity tool to help you manage and collaborate on projects more effectively. The secret recipe lies in the design of the boards, which can be categorized, tagged, and even customized with custom colors so that you always knew which boards (tasks) to prioritize.
It’s fairly popular amongst developer communities that constantly work on improving their software, having colored boards can help developers determine which tasks are most crucial to complete, and lets devs to assign and manage tasks that have already been finished. If anything, it’s a visual enterprise of productivity management that will not leave you disappointed.
Take Trello with you anywhere, as beautiful and modern iOS and Android apps are available to download on the app store. Companies like Google, PayPal, Adobe and others are all using Trello to improve their productivity, and if you know anything about the digital business sector — those names alone should mean a whole lot to you.
Hemingway Editor
Business people need to write, it’s an essential part of the business. For example, digital entrepreneurs will often market themselves using famous media publishing platforms, which means that writing needs to be acquired as a skill. Nevertheless, even if you outsource your writing, you still want to check it against common errors and readability. The Hemingway Editor is a digital online tool for checking your writing against common errors, use of poorly written words, and different ways that your writing is expressing itself. When you can perfect your writing for better readability, it makes your audience that much more interested to engage with what you have to offer.
In order to bring their writing to the next level. You might get frustrated at times, because of the sheer number of suggestions that this app is giving you, but once you’re done with editing you will understand that sometimes a little bit of polishing can go a long way towards a friendly and professional copy.
Chanty
If your business works primarily on a remote basis, a productivity tool will come exceptionally handy. Especially if it is free! Chanty is a spectacular solution that creates a “virtual office” where everyone can hang out. A team chat if you will.
It offers all sorts of fantastic perks of which communication is its focal point. Of course, you can stay in touch with everyone on your team via text, voice, or even video. You can also organize activities, collaborate by sharing screens, connect all the apps you use, well, you get the gist of it. One thing is for sure; a lot is possible with the impressive Chanty.
Needless to say, Chanty is also entirely mobile- and desktop-ready, coming with mobile and web apps. You can easily transition from one device to another and then back again and never lose a message.
A few extras include dark theme, emojis and gifs, mentions and 3rd-party messengers compatibility. As for the latter, you can import message histories from tools like Slack, HipChat, Stride and Flock. The free plan supports up to ten team members and integrations, as well as 30GB of file storage per team.
“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford
The web is not a static resource, things are dynamic and always changing, and website links is what it is all about. Even your business homepage is a link in itself, but when you’re doing concise research on subjects important to you, it’s easy to get lost in the sea of content overload, without ever managing to collect and manage all the important stories within a single dashboard, until now. Pocket is your digital library of the most interesting, useful, and insightful stories that you find on the web.
Having such a library can help you better organize your digital presence, understanding, and gives you the tools to keep track of the influential people in your niche. It’s simple to use, chrome users can install a simple extension that adds a Pocket button to your toolbar, whenever you stumble upon a website that you really enjoy. Just click the button and it is saved in your library, and if you like you can add custom keywords and descriptions, so that later on you remember the exact reason why you saved the link in the first place. Pocket is also kind enough to send out an email every day with the top stories as voted by the users, this can give you the edge to save time by not having to research top stories on your own.
OneDesk
OneDesk is a handy and user-friendly productivity tool that will keep your business or organization easily manageable. Before we even continue, you need to know that OneDesk offers a full 14-day free trial that will help you better understand the power of this fantastic tool. Hint: no credit card required. Once you give OneDesk a shot, all the rest becomes history.
That’s just the beginning.
To cut a long story short, OneDesk is a neat application that helps you offer the most outstanding customer support, manage your projects and take care of other services from one location. Instead of jumping from account to account to get things done, OneDesk – hence the name – ensures a more convenient approach.
As for the features, you can expect that OneDesk has very many. From remarkable and practical help desk and ticketing system to effective project management, it is all part of the OneDesk package. Chat, exclusive customer area, SLA policies, reporting, time-tracking and individual assignments are just a few of the features and functions that OneDesk unlocks.
Last but not least, OneDesk also smoothly connects with Zapier, which expands its functionality over and beyond. Some of the integrations include but are not limited to Twitter, Google, Jira, as well as different calendar and office apps. If you would like to take your project to a whole new degree, use OneDesk and make a difference.
Asana
Getting work done on a remote basis is a piece of cake with Asana. This productivity tool rocks tons of goodies that will help organize and manage projects and tasks no matter where in the world you are. Create a plan, stay on track and never miss a deadline again.
Since we are focusing on free tools, Asana’s Basic kit will do the trick. Keep in mind, this option is for freelancers and individuals exclusively. Some of the features include collaborating with up to fifteen team members, calendar view, unlimited projects, unlimited file storage with a limit of 100MB per file and more. Even though you do not have to pay a fee, Asana still delivers tons of great features to profit from. Lastly, you can seamlessly upgrade to any of the pro plans at any time you want.
Freedcamp
Freedcamp is a free productivity tool that helps you get started immediately. This outstanding project management solution is full of great features, even if you go with the free kit. It does not really matter what you are planning; keep it organized and execute it successfully with Freedcamp. Some of the key features of this software include tasks, calendar, file management, milestones, discussions, time tracking and more. Keep in mind, the free plan comes with all the essential features, as well as unlimited tasks, storage, users and projects. Take your productivity to an entirely different level, save time and avoid the hassle with Freedcamp.
Google Drive
Sharing content with the entire team has never been easier, thanks to Google Drive. Docs, Sheets, Slides, everything and anything works with Google Drive, having all the material available in the cloud. Also, with native apps, you can be present at all times, no matter what your current situation is. Google Drive is available to individuals, teams and even comes with an enterprise solution for when you would like to take the remote operation to the next level.
If you already have a Gmail account, you can pretty much start immediately with Google Drive. It is very simple and self-explanatory, making sure everyone gets the most out of it right from the get-go. If you dig Microsoft Office, you will absolutely adore Google Drive, that is a guarantee – and you do not need to pay a fee to start working with it.
Buffer
Take your social media presence to an entirely different degree with Buffer. Tell your brand story and boost your loyal fanbase to the extremes. There are three different premium packages available, however, after the 14-day free trial, you can downgrade to the free solution. The latter supports three social accounts, ten scheduled posts and one user. Buffer also comes with a ton of support; they even host live webinars for you to ask you about any question you want. Instead of doing all the work manually, you can have Buffer save you time and energy by distributing content for you.
Cyfe
Do you feel frustrated to have to visit individual business platforms and websites that you use for your business, all of them individually? It can be a tedious tasks to sort through dozens of business platform that you use for work daily. This problem was solved through the launch of digital business platforms, specific platforms that can organize your most favorite business tools in a single place, and even give you a completely new interface for analyzing and tracking the way that your business is performing.
Cyfe is somewhat of an expert in this field, and their business management platform can link together with some of the most prominent business software on the market, such as: Google, MailChimp, PayPal, Basecamp, Facebook, Compete, Klout, Stripe, Shopify and countless other services — get a clear real-time understanding of how your business is performing using Cyfe!
Business intelligence is a growing sector, within which business owners and entrepreneurs can better streamline the process of data analysis and performance tracking, so consider your options and maybe give Cyfe a try — you may find that you never want to go back to the traditional way of tracking your business performance.
ProofHub
If you would like to increase the productivity of your agency, business, and team, you came to the right place. ProofHub is a fantastic productivity tool that will keep you organized through the roof. And with organization comes a boost in the overall performance of your firm. With ProofHub, you create one space where all your team members, as well as clients, can interact, keeping the communication of the highest degree. Of course, this also means a way better control over projects, reducing the delivery time significantly. ProofHub comes especially handy if you are running your project remotely.
While the features of the convenient and super valuable ProofHub are very many, we will keep it short. After all, you can test ProofHub yourself free of charge and see how powerful it is. When speaking of features, ProofHub allows you to set custom roles, create a custom sign-in page and even set time tracking. There is also a chat feature, notes, project insights, calendar, and in-app notifications to name a few. Bear in mind, ProofHub is multilingual, coming in an assortment of different languages, like English, French, German, Spanish and more. When in search of an all-in-one software for teams and businesses, ProofHub is a killer tool that will do the trick.
CoSchedule
From journalists to bloggers, to publishers, everyone is involved in content production. It’s an unavoidable part of digital marketing, and small businesses are beginning to embrace the process of writing content on a regular basis to attract readership and new clients. That’s just how things are. In the olden days, it was enough to spark up open your WordPress dashboard and start typing new content, but these days as demand for content increases and companies hire more writers, it’s important to employ the technique of using a content calendar so that no days are missed, guaranteeing that content flows freely and in timely fashion.
CoSchedule has built a professional platform for keeping all your content-related tasks at optimal health and performance. CoSchedule doesn’t just permit general content editing only, it’s an excellent platform to use for content marketing, social marketing, general marketing project management, and blog management. It integrates the kind of tools that make you forget about the tedious task of having to keep written notes on your computer, and instead, everything is beautifully saved online in your own digital enterprise.
CoSchedule understands that one platform isn’t enough to keep it all nice and neat, so it happily provides tools to integrate with platforms like WordPress, Evernote, Google Chrome, and social media networks to truly streamline your process of editing, producing, and publishing interesting content.
HazeOver
Mac users are some of the most business driven people, many would say this is because of the high entry price for a new Mac computer, but perhaps the reason is far more simple than that, a Mac computer provides a super intuitive interface that makes doing business a breeze! HazeOver is a productivity tool specifically created for Mac users, it’s a “dimmer” tools that dims any background windows that you’re not using, and lets you focus on the window that you have open presently.
This lets you work with tools like Keynote and Pages without feeling the urge to change the window because you feel like you need to take a break. Don’t let yourself drown in scores of open windows. Hiding, switching, looking for the right one, more hiding, more switching. Calm down, breathe in, breathe out, launch HazeOver and finally concentrate on what’s you’ve been up to. HazeOver automatically highlights an active window or app when you switch windows. The less important things gently fade away in the background, helping increase your productivity.
Write
We do have a selection of productivity tools for writers available, but only because we have prior experience in business and we do know how pivotal writing is to a successful business. Getting the name out there of your business often involves collaborating on pieces for media platforms, and not having the right tools for doing impeccable writing can leave you with disappointment as your work gets rejected.
This stunning distraction-free writing tool for Windows and Mac computers is going to revolutionize the way you see writing, and how a simple software can improve your productivity by 1000% that easily. Within a single interface, you get tools for writing, editing, and taking notes — it’s much like turning your existing writing workflow into a powerhouse of an editing process, which only requires a single piece of software to achieve. You can choose from predetermined styles, focus modes, and templates to inspire yourself even more.
The Omni Group
The Omni Group is a software company that builds tools for Apple products: the Mac, iPad tablet, and iPhone smartphone. Their flagship productivity app is called OmniFocus, an individual piece of software developed for the purpose of helping users stay on top of things in tasks related to work, productivity, and other forms of document management. You can create dynamic lists of things to do, and add custom layers of tasks. These layers can be tasks that you already did or tasks that you still need to work on.
This way, you can encourage yourself to keep pushing through individual tasks knowing that you’re already making progress. The design is amazing, totally beautiful and will leave you stunned at the possibilities that Mac can provide for its users. The price, for an app of this scale, is really not so bad, and they’re constantly promoting their affordable offers so you could always upgrade to Pro for a reasonable price, needless to say, that putting a price on productivity is impossible, these tools will pay themselves back within days of using them.
IFTTT
When you’re running a business, every minute of your time counts, and the more time you lose the less productive you’re going to be in the long run. IFTTT is a recipe site built for managing and automating anything that you do online. It integrates with hundreds of popular web services that you can stitch together and perform automated tasks based on your requirements. Gmail users can use IFTTT to send automatic replies, and those who manage social media can configure a selection of recipes to send one piece of content to other social media networks just by posting on one site alone.
Other interesting productivity recipes include a streamlined way to schedule meetings, custom reminders for tasks that need to be finishes, ability to categorize important emails coming to your inbox, you can use IFTTT to sync your files across different cloud services so that they become accessible to everyone, you can even track the amount of time you’re spending on different tasks.. to truly test your ability to remain productive.
MailChimp
They say, digital marketers, that money is always on the list, it’s not far from the truth. With such large changes in the way that digital advertising works, thanks AdBlock! There’s a real incentive to move all selling and promotional campaigns towards an email list. Your email list becomes like the list of contacts you have in your phone, they’re always there and you can always “hit them up” with messages of your preference, for business people those messages will involve selling something, usually.
Think about managing a list of 10,000 email addresses without some kind of support from third-party software like MailChimp, it would simply be impossible! That’s why we can’t recommend MailChimp enough as one of the leading email marketing platforms out there, the reasons are many, but perhaps the fact that MailChimp provides a free plan for up to 2,000 email addresses is the ultimate selling point. You still get access to all those juicy tools and templates that make your emails look stunning, and upgrading is as easy as clicking a button.
The powerful automation features will go well with businesses that sell and promote products directly through email, some of our favorites include abandoned cart follow-ups, ability to follow up on product sales, and send out email campaigns tailored to the best customers on the list.. amazing software, you’ll be impressed how easy it is to use it, given the amount of scope that it can cover.
Betterteam
Creating the right team for your business is an essential part of success. Without the right people doing all the hard work, you’ll have a slim chance of succeeding as a lone wolf. Even solo entrepreneurs need to consider upgrading to office space as their business starts to grow and expand. Betterteam is a professional job seeking platform that can publish your job offers to more than one hundred of the most prominent job sites in the market. You could find your next best candidate within 48 hours using their amazing platform.
Betterteam enables employers to create a sophisticated business profile that can help others understand what your business does, and what kind of creative talents it is looking for, once that is done it’s time for you to fire up the job posting form and get ready for attracting some of the best talent in the world. Just think about the amount of time it would take you to go through all these job board sites individually, it’s a crazy amount of time, and Betterteam have found the perfect process to ease that process into a simple workflow. The pricing is below $500, but you can’t put a price on finding the perfect candidate for your open positions.
Hiveage
Billing should never be complicated, let your tax accountant deal with the numbers, while you enjoy sending invoices to your clients effortlessly. Hiveage is one of the better tools out there that can do automated billing requests, create a streamlined process of managing invoices, and even gives you ways to track orders and their past performance so that you never have to deal with people who’re avoiding of paying their dues.
Hiveage studies have shown that small businesses can expect to save up to 100 hours of work just by using their intelligent invoicing platform, and it makes sense.. doing billing manually is not a productive process, and the digital age has provided business owners with tools to take away that extra stress from getting stuff done quickly! The financial reports give you a clear glimpse of how well things are going in your business, and you can always take that data to learn and adapt to new ways of concluding business.
RescueTime
RescueTime to the rescue for your bad habits of spending too much time browsing Facebook and Reddit! RescueTime’s main functionality is to enable its users to track their average usage per application, which can then encourage users to cut down where necessary in order to be able to get more done while spending less time doing it. We love the alerts feature that helps to create a daily reminder for yourself on how much time you’ve spent doing a task, when the limit is reached the RescueTime software gives you a soft nudge letting you know that it is time to take a break or leave the rest for tomorrow.
RescueTime’s intelligent algorithm can also help to block out any time-wasting websites that you’re spending too much time on.. track your activity, and rule out the websites that take away all your productivity and only encourage procrastination, because once you do — your whole workflow will improve drastically. It’s a very well tested time management application, and the reviews couldn’t be any better.. it takes someone who understands productivity to build an app of this scale, and do know that RescueTime’s team are some of the best in this field.
Toptal
Developers and designers are in big demand right now, with the big tech companies trying to snag the best talent out of the market before it is too late. Toptal is the world’s leading job platform where some of the best technical talents in the world is hanging out. You can hire them for freelance projects, or you may even find them to apply for your permanent position, given that your offer is irresistible. Professional design and development is a costly thing, but it’s truly essential that business owners hire talent that they know they can trust.
This has never been an issue with Toptal, because the liability goes to the freelancer himself, he is putting his reputation on the line to deliver his best work for your personal needs, and if things to go wrong, the Toptal team will be there to assist you. Again, just a cautionary notice, but worth remembering. You can browse the Toptal’s directory of talent and pinpoint the exact kind of people who’d be of the best assistance for your current business requirements. You do get what you pay for, and paying for exceptional talent will provide exceptional results where the business is concerned.
Scoro
Scoro is a sophisticated platform for work management that will suite agencies, freelance businesses, and businesses of any size that require a complex platform that can do tasks related to calendar management, contacts, projects, quotes, expenses, invoices, and those who need in-depth reports of the business performance. It can track monthly revenue, give insights about any overdue payments. This also provides a really extensive way of managing events, proposals, and tasks that you need to accomplish.
Workers can collaborate together to make their own workflow ten times easier, whilst still doing the regular business as usual. Your company doesn’t have to give up on traditional business tools either, as Scoro provides a way to integrate itself with your favorite business apps: MailChimp, Dropbox, Xero, and others.
SEMrush
SEMRush is a digital software company that can provide its customers with competitive analysis of any website in the world. Wouldn’t you want to find out what people are searching for when they visit one of your competitor websites? Once you get access to that data, you can start to bring out the big guns. After that, you can repurpose some of their existing content to enrich it with more insights and information. IT’s a time-tested theory to win over your competition, and SEMrush affordable platform is going to give you so many invaluable insights about your own pages, including those of your competition, that you’ll never want to look back.
This is one of the services that we use on monthly basis to understand what kind of content is currently trending in the industry, but also to explore hidden backlink opportunities that could help our business grown. Nevertheless, the productivity with this tool is off the charts, and you won’t find a better solution for this price anywhere.
Kayako
Customer management is a huge niche by itself. It’s a sophisticated field of interest that covers everything to do with making customers happy. The reason is because all business people know — if customers are happy, the business is a success. One of the main ways of keeping customers happy is through your ability to listen to their needs and issues. There are better ways to do that, than to connect a solid help desk management platform to your digital business.
Kayako has been around for over a decade. Finally, it’s now stepping into the modern era of help desk and support management. Their software will take care of all the common quirks that you’d need to cover. It also helps when it comes to running a help desk platform on the web. It will be easy to communicate with your customers. At the same time, you generate reports and understand what is currently working and what isn’t. Kayako needs to take away a lot from constant customer queries. That can only improve your business bottom line in the long-term.
Insightly
Insightly is a modern tool that helps small business owners to manage tasks like lead generation, and contact management. It also aids in partnership relations, and supply and demand tasks. Using Insightly’s concise tools, you can understand everything there is to know about a particular customer or contact. It performs simple background checks to concise history that you’ve shared with each customer. Once you get your hands on this information, everything else becomes incredibly easy.
Insightly provides customers with a dashboard for managing any potential sales opportunities. With this, you can use your sales funnel to its full potential. Understand how others interpret your funnel and make improvements that will bring about a lasting improvement in your sales department. Users of Insightly have left good reviews about its support system. It’s always there to help each and every individual to make the most of their sales and customer relations management.
Streak
If Insightly seems too big of a choice for now, then you might want to check out Streak. Google Chrome, but also available on other devices. More than 500,000 users use this extension for all customer relations management, directly from Gmail. You can create custom sales pipelines that resemble an onboarding process. This gives you extensive ways to treat each email (customer) with the utmost care and respect.
All work-related emails come with custom widgets. This gives you an insight as to who you are talking to, and what you know about them already. It takes some time to get going with Streak. Once you have the basics figured out, you won’t want to go back. Your team will be excited to use only email for all sales-related tasks.
Traackr
How do you promote your business in front of a new audience, quickly and effectively? If there’s one method that has stood out over the years, then it’s definitely influencer marketing. Influencers are people who have already established themselves as influential persons in a particular market. Moreover, the influencer marketing as a category has continued to evolve over the years. Getting in touch with a new audience is pivotal for your own success. The more people you expose your product to, the more likely you’re going to grow your business. Influencers are everywhere and they’re also highly busy people. So, getting their attention will require some thorough thinking and research. This is where Traackr starts to come in.
A solid influencer management platform that puts you in charge of how you interact and land deals with prominent figures. Influence is something you earn, not something you buy. By building relationships with people your customers trust, you’ll earn lasting influence. That’s influencer marketing. Brands that use Traackr have more than doubled their level of influence. It’s not impossible, it’s influencer relationship management (IRM).
SpyFu
Last but not least, you have SpyFu. It’s a thorough keyword research tool that’s more affordable than SEMRush. It still gives you detailed reports of how each website is performing. Also, it tells you the main keywords that drive it to traffic. Knowing the right keywords is not just about content. It’s also about the purpose of content and how it can be improved to further strengthen your bottom line.
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