As a business owner, you definitely have a lot of things to complete, from daily operations (e.g., holding meetings) to long-term strategic planning. So, how can you make yourself and a whole team productive when dealing with heavy workloads? Previously, it seemed challenging. But today, managing workflows has become much easier thanks to the emergence of productivity apps. So, what are the best productivity apps you should consider these days? Let’s discover with us in today’s article!
Understanding Productivity Apps
Before diving into the best productivity apps, we want to briefly talk about what they are and why your business needs them.
What are Productivity Apps?
Productivity apps are software solutions that help you organize tasks, manage time, and boost your workflow’s efficiency. Their main goal is to make your team stay focused, reduce distractions, and streamline workflows, hence improving productivity across team members.
Productivity apps have been widely adopted in businesses, regardless of their industry or size. One research has shown their global revenue will surpass $81 billion in 2025. This figure will unsurprisingly continue to grow by 2.21% annually in the upcoming four years.Â
These apps come into different categories, dominated by office software with an estimated market value of around $29.5 billion in 2025. It’s followed by other types of productivity apps including administrative software, collaboration software, creativity software, and construction & design software.
Why Should Your Business Need Them?
Depending on your work and business objectives, your business should invest in different productivity apps to serve your daily operations or long-term strategic planning. It’s because these apps will bring you immense benefits as follows:
1. Improve Task Management
As we already mentioned, business owners and their teams have to handle a pile of work that needs completion on a daily basis. However, they often struggle with which tasks should be prioritized, how current work is going, and more.
With the assistance of productivity apps, you can organize workflows more efficiently and logically. From setting priorities to tracking progress, these apps ensure that nothing is overlooked.
Such applications offer data insights on task completion and employee performance. This allows you to allocate work and resources more effectively to avoid delays while maintaining productivity.
2. Enhance Time Management
Productivity apps now integrate features to help everyone pay more attention to their work and manage time better. For example, such apps as Google Calendar or Asana offer scheduling tools and visual timelines to make your daily, weekly, or monthly plans in advance. They even send notifications for upcoming tasks, meetings, or deadlines to keep everyone on track.
Other apps like Clockify or Toggl enable your teams to track how much time is spent on each task. This provides in-depth insights into whether they’re using time effectively and where they should improve.
3. Foster Collaboration
These apps are often hosted on the cloud, enabling your teams to access tasks, schedules, and files from anywhere. They even allow for remote collaboration and communication by providing features for video conferencing, real-time comments, sharing, and chats.
4. Increase Focus and Satisfaction
Some apps like Focus Keeper use time management techniques (e.g., Pomodoro) or distraction blocking features to help you focus better. Further, they can incorporate seamlessly with other tools to streamline processes and automate data sharing.
With tech advancements, many apps even integrate AI-powered chatbots to search for information or answer common questions. They even have automation features to automate repetitive tasks, like updating records or sending follow-up emails. This not only reduces manual workflows and human errors but also keeps employees focused and satisfied.
5. Allow for Smooth Scalability
When your business evolves, workloads are definitely increasing and your team also becomes larger. With their scalability capability, productivity apps allow your business to scale up seamlessly. In particular, they coordinate larger teams and manage growing workloads with ease.Â
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The 10 Best Productivity Apps for Business Owners
You understood what productivity apps are and their importance in today’s business landscape. So, in this section, we’ll continue to introduce a detailed list of 10 best productivity apps you should consider as a business owner:
1. Todoist
Which tasks do you need to complete today, and at what time? With Todoist, you can manage all your tasks in one central platform with ease. You can label tasks, set priorities, add deadlines, and set reminders to notify when you should complete what.
One thing we like the most about Todoist is that it allows us to integrate more than 80 apps and turn any documents therein to tasks. With flexible views, you can track your tasks in a list, calendar, or board and assign them to the right members. It also gives you a snapshot of account activity added or completed by a certain member.
Further, Todoist allows your members to discuss details, attach files, and send voice comments right inside your tasks. This enhances collaboration and productivity across teams.
2. Trello
Trello is a powerful productivity tool to manage internal projects or non-technical teams (e.g., human resources or administration) at Designveloper. It keeps our tasks organized in different views like lists, boards, and views, whether these tasks are about project management, onboarding, resource allocation, or meetings.
Particularly, it allows us to categorize our work into different columns with tags like To Do, Doing, and Done. Trello also helps us assign tasks to the right person, add checklists, set due dates, and automatically remind us of the upcoming deadlines.
Plus, this project management app allows for smooth integrations with external software solutions (e.g., Slack or Jira) and power-ups (e.g., Gmail or Voting). These integrations get your work done effectively. Moreover, Trello now launches Butler to automate your workflows based on your predefined rules, giving you more time to focus on the most critical work.
3. Slack
Slack is a versatile productivity platform that facilities project management and collaboration for the best outcomes. Accordingly, it offers customizable templates, canvas, and lists to add your workflows, organize action items, allocate resources, and track deadlines efficiently.
Further, Slack allows your teams to discuss projects, share files, send messages, and hold voice or video meetings. It even eases your secure communication with people outside your company through Slack Connect, removing the need for siloed email threads.
With AI functionalities, Slack gets your work done productively. Slack’s AI agents can help find answers, summarize conversations instantly, recap the most important messages from different channels, and more.
4. Dropbox
Dropbox is a cloud storage platform that allows you to store, access, and share files from any device. It helps you keep all your files organized in the cloud without worrying about data security as it’s equipped with industry-leading encryption, two-factor authentication, and automatic backup.
Dropbox even allows you to edit and sign your documents, collaborate on projects, search through all your apps, and automatically back up your important files on devices.
5. Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free scheduling and time management tool. With available versions on a website and mobile devices, it easily helps you schedule the agenda for all day, including meetings, conference calls, off-days, etc. Further, you can change calendar views to see your schedules in various time formats (e.g., Day or Week), as well as switch color coding for your events to improve visual organization.
Besides creating and managing these events, you can set notifications and reminders so as not to miss any crucial events. You can even share calendars with others and grant them with different access levels (e.g., editing or viewing).
As a part of Google’s software suite, Google Calendar can be seamlessly integrated with other Google services like Google Meet or Gmail. For this reason, you can automatically add events from other services to Google Calendar.
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6. Evernote
Evernote is a comprehensive note taking app that helps you keep track of everything from jotting down ideas to planning big projects. What we most like about Evernote is that it allows us to capture more than just words by scanning and storing our key files, documents, and images. Amazingly, you can take audio notes, and invite other members to edit in real-time. Evernote then will automatically sync every information across all your devices for ease of access.
With AI-powered capabilities, Evernote helps streamline your workflows and improve productivity. Particularly, AI helps summarize, translate, and check the spelling of your notes. It also integrates Search features to find the right information from your notes reliably.
7. Toggl Track
Toggl Track is one of the best productivity apps that track your team’s time data and build custom reports to increase efficiency. It allows you to view your workflows and deadlines in a calendar format and from any platform (e.g., website, desktop, or mobile devices).
Moreover, Toggl Track allows for smooth integrations with other software solutions like Slack, Notion, or Trello. It then automatically tracks your team’s activity to calculate their work hours and bill clients accurately.
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8. Fireflies
If you’re looking for an AI meeting assistant, don’t ignore Fireflies. This tool aims to automatically transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze all your voice conversations, no matter where these conversations come from (e.g., Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams).
Further, its AI capabilities can analyze various factors (e.g., speaker talk time or sentiment) to offer in-depth insights into meetings. You can use these insights to coach teammates for better communication.
Fireflies can improve your workflows by automatically logging call notes, recordings, and activities from meetings into the CRM systems. Plus, during meetings, you can use voice commands to automate the creation of tasks in Trello, Asana, and other project management tools. Also, it can instantly share meeting recaps to different collaboration apps like Slack or Google Docs. Such meeting conversations will be turned into a real-time knowledge base for your entire team to access and search for whenever.
9. RescueTime
RescueTime is an excellent time tracking app you should consider for your business. This app helps you set goals, track your time, and block distracting websites or apps. Essentially, it can produce real-time reports to show how productive you are on your work, when you work best, and when you’re distracted by which factors. Additionally, you can tailor the settings to ensure RescueTime will return an accurate result.
With dedicated timesheets, you can visually manage numerous tasks, projects, and clients with ease. Further, you can discover trends in your workflow to become more productive and stay focused.
10. Zoom Workplace
Zoom Workplace is an integral part of any business which wants to organize effective audio and video meetings, no matter where its workers are living. This collaboration app integrates a multi-speaker view to emphasize who is actively speaking during the meetings. It can also intelligently tag participants in meetings when you open a Zoom Room.
Noticeably, its AI Companion also helps transcribe meeting conversations at 95% accuracy and produce answers faster than GPT-4. You can even ask the AI assistant to perform routine tasks, such as preparing meeting materials or brainstorming ideas.
Further, you can combine your calendar and new agenda into one tab to ease information sharing and collaboration between members. Also, Zoom’s Team Chat functionality keeps assets (e.g., resources or whiteboards) in one single view to keep you organized.
How Can You Choose the Right Productivity Apps?
There are a variety of productivity apps out there. So how can you pick the right ones to align with your current workflows and team? Let’s consider the following tips to find the suitable tech stacks for your business:
1. Understand Your Business Needs
Evaluate your pain points that need productivity apps to address, like project management, time tracking, or communication. Then, define clear goals based on these challenges, such as streamlining workflows or improving collaboration).
2. Assess App Features
List all the apps that can tackle your pain points and consider whether they provide features aligned with your needs (e.g., calendar integration or AI capabilities). Also, evaluate whether the apps have intuitive interfaces or require a short learning curve. Further, look at other capabilities of the apps like smooth integrations with your existing tools, customization, scalability, and security measures.
3. Review User Feedback and Case Studies
Look at testimonials and reviews from other users to see how businesses, especially in your specific industry, have benefited these apps.
4. Examine Cost and ROI
Don’t forget to consider your budget and compare different pricing plans to pick the most suitable apps. You should also compute how the apps will boost productivity across your company and reduce costs over time. This helps you determine the ROIs of these apps to see whether investments in them are worthwhile.
5. Test Before Committing
You should also test the apps before reaching long-term commitments. By using free trials or demos, you can assess how the chosen apps perform and benefit your workflows. Also involve your team members in testing to collect their feedback and ensure the apps fulfill their demands.
Final Words
Productivity apps are becoming increasingly important in our personal projects and today’s business landscape. By following our tips, you can choose the best productivity apps to streamline workflows and enhance employee productivity. For more interesting news about this topic, subscribe to our blog now and receive the latest articles as soon as possible!
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