Do you find yourself ruled by your schedule, constantly running, and too often running late? If you could seamlessly integrate work and personal schedules, with downtime built in, wouldn’t you do it?
Good news! There are a lot of apps out there that have been developed to free you from repetitive actions, to make sure you know about appointments well ahead of time, and to allow you to work from anywhere, any time.
The seven apps we’re highlighting here can turn half hour and hour segments of dead or wasted time into productive time, allowing you to transfer those hours into fun time or extra profits.
Hootsuite (free and Pro versions)
Hootsuite was originally designed as a Twitter app. It’s been around for a few years now and has expanded to handle most social media platforms. However, it still delivers on its original promise: to make your social media campaigns more efficient.
It’s easy to set up, and it allows you to link all your social media content, schedule tweets for distribution across those platforms, and find out who’s interested in your postings. It offers many more functions, but those are the big time savers. For small businesses that want to establish a social media presence but just don’t have the time to consistently engage, it’s huge.
…HELPS YOU KEEP MORE OF WHAT YOU DON’T WANT TO LOSE…
Evernote (free and paid premium)
“Remember everything, capture anything, access anywhere, find things fast.” Evernote promises a lot – and it’s all true. Whether you’re creating a reading list of article URLs to browse through later, jotting down notes for a speech, or just saving ideas to your phone that pop into your head in random places, Evernote helps you keep more of what you don’t want to lose.
Evernote is cloud-based, so you can access your treasure trove anytime from anywhere. Evernote also helps you organize your tasks and thoughts for easy retrieval. It’s especially useful if you have to do a fair amount of writing, because it comes with a basic formatting toolbar that allows you to clean up what you’ve written and smoothly transfer it with the formatting to the final document form you prefer.
Tip: If you like to cook, Evernote is a great place to store your favorite recipes, and now offers Evernote Food to make that little feature even more fun and useful.
LastPass (free and paid premium)
The latest answer to the question, “How do I take all my site passwords with me when I travel and not have to worry about identify theft?” LastPass can save you hours of time spent fishing around for a forgotten password, and you can securely access this cloud-based service while traveling.
Here’s how it works: You create a LastPass account with — yes — one more password, but after that, it’s smooth sailing. LastPass captures your login information for every site you visit once you’ve downloaded it. Then, the next time you visit a site that is stored in your LastPass “vault,” LastPass opens the gates for you, with no need to recall your password. It has other features as well, but this one is the reason to get this app.
Checklist Wrangler $0.99
The iPhone and iPad are perfectly suited to serve as checklist platforms, and now Checklist Wrangler offers the perfect app for those screens. As a means for creating and managing electronic checklists, this simple solution lets you not only quickly make different types of lists, but helps you manage your execution of the items on the list.
It organizes your list into groups for easy retrieval, allows you to email lists or print them out, and converts text check lists from other devices into lists on your phone. Along with your synced online calendars and auto alerts, you should now be able to get to where you need to go on time, and check it off your list on your way out the door.
Harvest (free and paid premium)
Manage your time (and your employees’ time) by figuring out where it’s being spent with Harvest, an easy-to-use app that lets you create projects, invite employees to those projects, and easily keep track of all the time being spent on the project through the web or on your smartphone. Use Harvest’s report features to figure out if your time is being spent optimally, and to see exactly where things need to be changed.
Daily Agenda $1.99
Daily Agenda is an iOS app that lets you organize your calendars in one place and keep track of all your events for the day. It features a countdown to the start of your next event, as well as displaying the time that has elapsed during your current event. To aid in your goal of simplification, Daily Agenda doesn’t make you add events or let you change them, but rather pulls your events from the calendars already synced to your device.
Pocket FREE
Do you find yourself getting distracted by articles and videos during your prime work hours? Even a short article can derail your productivity, especially since it usually takes about 20 minutes to get back to your original level of concentration after a distraction. The solution? Pocket. This handy app lets you save an article, video or entire page from the web into your queue, which you can then access from any computer, your phone or your tablet. You can even download items to view offline. This will let you mark things during the day, and then get to them when you have free time.
Did we miss an app? What’s your favorites? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!
This article was written by Dan Cook.
