Great apps like the ones here can make work feel more tolerable, and all of them are either new or had major updates over the last year. Here’s the thing, I have tried many different productivity and time management apps, Todoist vs wunderlist , But it seems like they were all missing one or a few important functions or they were not very easy to use.That means it’s still important to find your own ways of staying on task and keeping organized, even if you’re not heading back to the office full time (or at all). Aspire Productivity is being built from the ground up to be the Best Calendar App out there.It also blocks email trackers, lets you separate emails by date, and offers a beautiful, full-screen composition window. The web browser extension centers your inbox so it’s easier to read, hides Google’s unnecessary app buttons, and tones down distracting colors. To avoid repetition, I’ve chosen ten apps that all serve a different purpose, rather than ten project management apps, for example, that all basically do the same thing.A less-messy Gmail: As an answer to all the cruft that Google’s email service has built up over the past 17 years, Simplify Gmail is a revelation. It is private and secure and will let you to monitor and measure the email productivity of your team and other employees.Best productivity apps for macOS Before we start looking at individual apps, here’s a quick summary of what we’ll be covering in this article. Clear the clutterMac Productivity Apps Bonus: Email Analytics This app is one of those mac productivity apps that will help you keep in track of and visualize your team’s email activity.
Productivity Apps Free Rocky SandFree Rocky Sand Studio Ltd. Free Microsoft Corporation 3. Simplify Gmail is Gmail—only simpler.Top Productivity Apps 1.Too many browser tabs? Making them vertical in Microsoft Edge can help.A novel newsletter solution: The boom in email newsletters has led to plenty of apps for managing them all, but none of those solutions work quite like Meco. Stick with vertical tabs for a couple of weeks, and you may never want to go back. By stacking tabs along the left sidebar, you can fit lots more of them on the screen without losing sight of page titles, and you can easily hide the sidebar when more horizontal space is necessary. Bartender keeps your Mac’s Menu Bar clutter to a minimum.More room for tabs: Microsoft Edge keeps finding innovative ways to make web browsing more productive, and vertical tabs are its best new feature yet. Version 4 is a major update, adding new ways to surface items just when you need them, including by hovering over blank menu bar space and by creating your own keyboard shortcuts. The free web app offers 20 sounds to mix and match, including rain, wind, ocean waves, and good old white noise. Noise to work by: When you need some ambient noise to drown out whatever’s happening around you—whether it’s at home or in the office— Noizer gets the job done. That way, you can stop hoarding articles in your browser tabs and just listen to them later. The web version works well enough, but if you head to Audiblogs’ settings, you’ll get a unique feed URL to load into your podcast app of choice. Turn articles into podcasts: Like Pocket in podcast form, Audiblogs takes any article on the web and reads it aloud. The result is a cleaner inbox and simpler signups for the newsletters you want to read. Lofi Cafe is streaming audio in an engagingly old-school package.A helpful tap on the wrist: Unlike your typical focus timer, Ian’s Awesome Counter lives exclusively on your Apple Watch. Use it to keep stress levels at a minimum. It offers more than a dozen radio stations full of mellow, downtempo beats, set along to nostalgic, looping visuals. If a little ambient sound helps you keep productive, turn on Noizer.Beats to chill with: For ambient audio with a little more soul, check out Lofi Cafe instead. Git for macWith Progress Bar in place, December 31 will never sneak up on you again.Meetings at a glance: Speaking of Mac Menu Bar apps, Itsycal is a brilliant one that adds a little pop-up calendar to the top bar, along with a list of your upcoming events and a button for creating new ones. It’s a novel way to measure your day and recognize when time’s running out. Progress Bar for Windows adds two circular meters to your taskbar, representing the amount of time left in the current day and year. Your time, measured: After highlighting a neat Mac Menu Bar app called Progress Bar OSX a couple of years ago, it’s only fair to circle back for the Windows equivalent. The developer, David Smith, built the app for his son, who sometimes has difficulty managing his attention, then put it in the App Store figuring it could be useful to anyone. All documents are end-to-end encrypted so that not even Skiff can see them, and it’s easy to add watermarks or password protection to each one. Totally private writing: If you’re worried about having Google handle your documents, take a look at a more private alternative offered by Skiff. The big news for 2021 is the much-improved iPhone/iPad version, Devonthink to Go, which can now perform feats such as OCR-ing the text in PDFs right on your device—no cloud required. The ultimate research organizer: PDFs, Word documents, web pages, your own notes—if you’ve got projects that involve assembling myriad pieces of information in one place and then finding them later, Devonthink can help. Updates this year added integration with cloud storage services, along with the ability to publish on WordPress, Ghost, and Tumblr. That makes it similar in spirit to Typora, but with support for mobile devices and the web. But unlike most Markdown editors, it doesn’t display any of the clunky syntax that makes your writing look more like code. You don’t have to take out a loan to get Pixelmator’s advanced image-editing goodies.Taking on Lightroom, too: What Pixelmator is to Photoshop, Darkroom is to Adobe’s Lightroom software, providing a wide range of filters and sliders for processing your photos. As always, you have to pay for it only once. A major update to its Mac app last fall reiterated that point, adding native Apple silicon support and a much slicker and more customizable interface. Instead of just cloning the desktop version, Adobe made its vector graphics app more tablet-friendly with a hovering context menu, while also adding new features such as a repeat function for creating patterns. Last fall, the company brought Illustrator to the iPad, further making good on plans to treat Apple’s tablet as a first-class productivity tool. Darkroom is another outstanding Adobe alternative.Illustrating on iPad: Let’s give Adobe its due, though. With an extension called tl dv, you can record video calls in Google Meet, tag the relevant portions with notes in real time, and then send the video (with timestamps and transcriptions) to the folks who need to see it later. Communication boostersSkip the meetings: Maybe you don’t need the entire team on your next videoconference, after all. Halide Mark II lets you go beyond the basics with fine-grained focus controls, various ways to check color composition, and the ability to save RAW and JPEG files simultaneously. (The feature launched in Grammarly’s browser extension in 2019.) Just tap the green “G” button after writing at least 150 characters, and the app’s AI will instantly analyze how you sound. With Around, you can barely see your remote coworkers’ surroundings, let alone make fun of them.Check your tone: Is your writing style a bit too casual for work, or too formal for friends? Find out by using Grammarly, whose iOS and Android keyboard apps added tone detection in March. Around launched out of private beta in March, and recently launched a mobile app that lets you hand off calls from the desktop. Participants appear as small chat bubbles—cropping out most of the decor behind them—allowing documents and other content to take center stage. (See also: Perfect Recall or Otter Assistant for Zoom.) Focus on the work: As an alternative to Zoom, Around tries to fight video call fatigue by putting less emphasis on people’s faces.
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