5 under-the-radar apps that make you instantly more productive

You probably don’t think there’s much more your phone can do for you. Sitting there silently in your pocket, your handset is likely your alarm, your calendar, your camera, your social-media organiser, your Netflix and Spotify player and your notepad. Not to mention your phone…

But, with over seven million potential downloads across iOS and Android, it’s no surprise that there are a couple more clicks that could make your life quicker. Productivity apps are a massive market, and ironically you could spend hours scrolling through what’s on offer. But we’ve sorted through the hinterland to help streamline your search – so your push for productivity can start right now…

Once marketed as ‘the easiest life manager around’, Any.do lays claim to over 25 million users. You’re offered the chance to keep your tasks, lists, calendars and reminders in one place, which sync easily across all your devices. The pared-back, easy-to-navigate look allows you to find any appointment – down to every minute of every hour of every day – with little fuss, and the trio of pending, WIP and done lists offer a straightforward yet refined way of managing workloads unseen in many other such apps.

Social media can easily become the bane of your life. With so many apps springing up, dying away or changing their interfaces, and with the algorithm constantly changing, it can be nigh on impossible to keep your statuses, profiles and activity optimised. Buffer is built to help nix all that, a simpler and easier way to schedule posts, track the performance of your content, and manage all your accounts in one place, whether it’s for business or personal use.

Here’s another app that earns its stripes through versatility. Compatible with iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and browsers, Notion is angled at many families of work apps. From document-sharers such as Google Drive and Dropbox, through to messengers (Slack), to task-organising apps like Trello, Notion wraps them all up into one tool and brings them together with visual uniformity. As it once said of itself, it’s “the all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.”

LastPass is one of the most impressive password vaults we’ve ever encountered. Are you tired of forgetting what 14-character word you used to get into that streamer? What number you arbitrarily added to the end of your memorable phrase? Worry no more. LastPass will back up and sync all your passwords and then autofill them on any of your secured, approved devices.

Productivity, of course, isn’t just about the organising. Sometimes, you need a little oasis from office life to help you get things done – and that’s where Noisli proves its worth. A reassuringly simple app, this helps you create ambient soundscapes to zone out of your surroundings and in on the task at hand. Think thunderstorms. Think calm forest movements. Think coffee shops. Think productivity.

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