Our Top 6 Apps To Keep You Productive In 2017
Friday, January 13th, 2017 by TBD Design
It’s the start of another year and everyone is bursting at the seams with ideas and enthusiasm for “getting things done this year”… right?
Here at TBD we have a bunch of web and mobile apps that help us stay organised and assist with productivity. From time-keeping to managing projects, below are examples of the ones we love (and use) and a few we think may help you meet those new year goals.
Harvest
$12 per person per month. Discounts for 50+ person teams, nonprofit and educational institutions, and classroom use.
Harvest has been TBD’s go-to time tracking tool for a number of years. As well as tracking time, it also allows you to manage projects, view individual and team hours, set budgets with reminders, send quotes, monitor expenses and more. At any stage of the project you can extract hours and filter the results by date, time, staff or task. It has a simple, intuitive interface and works across all devices so it’s easy to get started right away. For a business or individual where tracking time and billing by the hour important, this is a great tool.
Available on: iOS, Android, Apple Watch
Trello
Free and three levels of paid accounts.
Trello is a collaboration based tool that helps organise your projects into cards and boards. We love this tool for managing all our projects, from small day-to-day tasks through to larger projects that span months. The interaction is a simple drop & drag framework which makes sorting your project list quick and easy. It’s great for teams that collaborate, allowing users to add comments, to tell what projects are being worked on, who’s working on them, and where something is in process. It’s inexpensive (the free option is great) and highly visual which helps the sometimes mundane task of managing a jobs list a lot more fun.
Available on: Android, iPhones, iPads, Amazon Fire tablets, Windows 8 tablets.
Hightail
Free, Pro or Business
Hightail (was YouSendIt) is a cloud service that,in simple terms, lets users send and receive large files. You can share images, videos, PDFs, presentations and more for your team or client to access easily as high-res previews. Team members or clients can download files, leave comments about the latest version and easily track previous versions and conversations. It offers a simple desktop app, Hightail Express, for sending files only or the online version for the more collaborative features.
Available on: iOS, Android and Desktop apps
Evernote
Free & Paid options
This is a great one for taking notes or briefs, as well a wide range of tasks, with it’s ability to store photos, notes, web pages, audio clips, PDF files, sync files, record voice reminders and create to-do lists. Work Chat is one of Evernote’s newest features which allows you to instant message with team mates about shared notes. One of the best features is how easy it is to access on a variety of platforms – desktop, mobile device or the web.
Available on: iOS, Android
Pocket
Free
Pocket is a “read it later” bookmarking app. Pocket saves articles and videos you find online for easy access later. It includes a special reading mode that removes excess ads or images and has an offline reading mode for the mobile app so you can download articles and read them anywhere even without a connection. It also includes a built-in social network for publicly sharing articles and finding recommendations. This is a great app for getting back to those things you find surfing the web but don’t always have time to view them at the time.
Available on: iPad, iPhone, Android, Mac, Kindle Fire, Kobo, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Windows.
Spotify
Free & Paid
Not sure if you’ve heard of this little music steaming service? Whilst not directly related to productivity, this one definitely helps set the mood in the office and keeps the music playing all day, every day. It’s great. But I’ll let you look into that one for yourself…
Available on: Microsoft Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, Android and iOS smartphones and tablets