There are countless so-called ‘productivity apps’ on the market, all claiming that they can force you out of procrastination and into a state of unbridled target-accomplishing bliss. Rob Leane asks: do any of them actually work?
The term ‘productivity app’ may seem like a misnomer, seeing as most apps available these days tend to have the opposite effect. Between this writer’s phone and his laptop, there’s enough downloaded content to stop me from ever doing any actual work. My phone tends to be filled with the likes of Candy Crush, Words With Friends and an ever-growing myriad of social media platforms. These regularly combine into a super-effective distraction device, more than anything else.
It’s lovely to imagine a world where this isn’t the case, though. Where your devices can serve the purpose of pushing you professionally and personally. Got a job that needs doing? Well, wouldn’t it be great if your apps could actually help you, rather than hindering any chance of productivity? Of course it would. The real question is: where to start?
The market for productivity apps is already oversaturated. A brief search online presented five possible contenders for the productivity app crown, so I gave them a look in the hope of discovering one that’s actually worth investing in…
OmniFocus
One productivity app seems to have more recommendations than any other: OmniFocus. If you’re a committed Apple customer, this software is targeted directly at you. It’s only available on Mac, iPad and iPhone, and it claims to offer you a chance to “keep life and work in balance, stay on top of projects and goals, accomplish them faster, and play a little bit more.'
If you’re wondering what the catch is, there is the small matter of the price tag. OmniFocus doesn’t come for free, it actually offers a range of pricing options – but for the standard Mac or iOS version, you’ll need to splurge out at least $40 (roughly £25) to get it. For the full ‘pro’ service, you can add another $40 (for Mac) or $20 (for iPad and iPhone’s iOS). That, honest, is a hefty price to pay.
There is a free 14-day trial for the standard Mac version, though, so we gave it a look. On first glance, OmniFocus looks a little confusing. There’s a series of tabs along the top bar, and a shed-load of other options down the left hand side of the screen. If you’re the type of person who likes skipping the instructions and jumping straight into an easy-to-understand and ergonomic-to-use software, you may find yourself in need of a manual on this occasion.
Once you get into the swing of it, however, there is a certain elegance to OmniFocus which arguably warrants the price tag. Even at its most basic level, it has some handy features. At first it basically feels like a list-making service, helping you create a run-down of all the tasks ahead of you in the foreseeable future.
Once you delve deeper, though, you realise that you can time reminders for yourself, group tasks together into ‘projects,’ or even create a ‘perspective’ where only certain tasks are shown for you. If you struggle with juggling too many jobs at once, this feature is a godsend. If you’re not working on a certain thing today, you can hide it, and get on with the other stuff. It will pop back up whenever you told it to resurface.
Personally, I found this pretty useful as a freelancer who does odd bits and bobs for various contacts. It’s a great way to streamline your goals on a day-byday basis. As the first app tested for this article, then, OmniFocus will be hard to beat on everything but the price tag.
Things
As well as only being targeted at Mac users, Things also shares another significant feature with OmniFocus – a hefty fee for purchase. You should prepare to stump up $50 (around $30) if you decide to pick this product up. Various versions of Things are available across Mac, iPhone, iPad and the Apple Watch. Again though, there’s a free trial that lets you try before you buy.
Things opens up without much fanfare, appearing like a fairly simple list app. The menu down the left-hand side tells you the available categories: today, next, scheduled, someday and projects. There’s also an inbox for as-yet-unfiled tasks and a logbook were already-completed jobs are stored for future reference.
There’s a lot of similar features to OmniFocus here, including the ‘tag’ function, which can be used as Things’ version of the afore-discussed ‘perspectives’ option from OmniFocus. Only working on personal jobs today? Then click into the ‘personal’ tag and you won’t see by your list of work tasks anymore. Unlike OmniFocus’ perspectives, though, Things’ tags are always in view.
If I had told OmniFocus not to bother me with work stuff, I wouldn’t be able to see any reference to work at all. On Things, I can still see the word ‘work’ at the top of the screen, regardless of my commands. It’s a tiny difference, but it’s enough to mean that work still looms over you when you’re not meant to be thinking about it.
On the upside, though, Things does have a nice ‘someday’ feature where you can easily shove odd jobs for an upcoming rainy day. There’s also the ability to press the ‘not today’ button and dismiss a task that you won’t get around to until tomorrow.
My favourite feature of Things is probably the ‘energy’ option, though. That lets you define the difficulty of a task so that, at the end of a tough day, you can get it to provide you with a quick reminder of what ‘easy’ jobs you have left. That comes in very handy on Friday afternoons when you can’t face a much tougher task than sending a few emails. It may not be worth thirty quid of your money, though.
30/30
In the light of what’s come before, the first – and possibly the most – important thing to note about 30/30 is that downloading it won’t cost you a penny. Yes: It’s free! There are optional in-app purchases, though, that could add up if you’re not careful – and 30/30 lacks a desktop version. It’s only intended for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
I downloaded 30/30 onto my fairly bog standard iPhone 4c, and I’m happy to say that I won’t be deleting it any time soon. Also, I’ve managed to use it for a week or so without incurring any of those in-app charges that the App Store warned me about upon download.
Immediately, you’ll be struck by the fact that the user interface seems unique and interesting, which puts 30/30 ahead of both OmniFocus and Things in terms of attention-catching design. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up for debate, as there’s an argument to be made that a brightly coloured productivity app could become more of a distraction than a helper. However, that’s not the case here.
In fact, 30/30 is clearly targeted at people with short attention spans – which, frankly, suits this writer down to the ground. As such, the whole system is based around alloting time for your tasks and setting yourself a series of microdeadlines every day. For example: my list of jobs on the day of writing this article looked like this: write article pitches – one hour, write productivity article – three hours, buy and wrap nephew’s birthday present – two hours. Spoiler alert: I got all those things done.
You can break your day down into even smaller tasks if that suits your style and purpose (like ‘read report – 20 minutes’ or ‘email Steve – 5 minutes,’ if you like). If you’re a short-attention-span type of guy, like me, these micro-targets can really help you get momentum going in the morning and maintaining it through the span of a day. A timer in the middle of the screen will remind you how long you have left of the time you set aside for your current task, which can add a bit of urgency to proceedings.
If something comes up and you need to switch tasks, you can do that, too. 30/30 will remember how long you had to go on the previous task and will resume the timer when you get back to it. As a freelancer who does a lot of work at home, setting myself strict daily guidelines in this way came in very handy. It may not work for everyone, but it really worked for me.
Evernote
The main, original Evernote app is fairly brilliant – it’s a note-making and taskmanagement service that can be used individually or by whole businesses. Evernote also offers a wide range of other apps. These can help all sorts of different people get on top of their daily to-do list.
Whether you champion a good oldfashioned to-do list or prefer to manage your day in a more specific style (e.g. by the hour, or by project, or by team), there’s probably an Evernote app that suits your style.
For those who don’t want to fill their phone with any more notifications, Sunrise Calendar turns your notes into reminders and syncs them directly into your calendar, meaning that all your upcoming events – from meetings, to solitary tasks, to birthday parties, will all be stored in the same place.
There’s also Swipes, which makes the information that your store in Evernote actionable and task-orientated. For people who love the feeling of ticking something off a to-do list, Swipes is a solid app equivalent that’s much shinier and sleeker than your boring old Notes app, and it lets you categorise tasks in a variety of ways, too.
You can use Cloze in conjunction with Evernote, as well. This lets you assign your notes to specific contacts and groups, which can come in very handy if you have a lot of tasks going on at once.
Also from Evernote, CloudMagic lets you create notes from your emails with the tap of a touchscreen; SwiftKey helps you write notes quicker; Boxer is Evernote’s version of Dropbox; and IQ Tell combines various services to help you get through tasks faster.
All in all, Evernote is trying hard to dominate the productivity game, but we’d say the original app is still the best. The original Evernote is available for Windows and Android, too, making it a bit more all-inclusive than most of the products on this list. The free basic version is definitely worth a trial run.
Asana
Available via Android, iOS, or as a browser-based online service , Asana is all about avoiding the hassle of messy internal communications. If you’re fed up of searching your inbox for that one elusive piece of information that’s hidden in an elongated thread from several months ago, this is the app to try out.
As the Asana website puts it, everyone in your team probably spends hours “reading, writing, sorting, searching, filtering and forwarding emails – it never ends.” It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Essentially, Asana’s aim is to simplify these office tasks.
The idea here is that your whole team would download Asana, and use its simple interface to create projects, set deadlines, post comments, and assign tasks. This service makes it a little easier to communicate important information and to make sure everyone is on the same page, rather than relying on lengthy and confusing email threads.
In Asana, communication and tasks are all on the same place. Edits can be made to draft documents, and everyone will be notified. It’s not unlike a social media platform for projects, in that way. You wouldn’t need to download a document from an email, make your edits, change the title, re-upload the document and send it off in a different email. Asana has cut a lot of steps out for you, there.
As long as your team consists of fifteen-or-less people, Asana is free. If you want more from the service, there’s the option to pay a premium fee for some extra features. Even the basic option is pretty useful, though, as a way to bypass email faff and get straight to the work that needs to be done.
The fact that you can view Asana on any device with web browsing capabilities can come in very handy, too, especially when the need arises to work from home or to join an important discussion while on the go.
Final Thoughts
In the battle of the productivity apps, it’s impossible to choose a decisive winner that will work perfectly for everyone. After all, everyone does different jobs, in different environments and finds different difficulties that stop them from firing on all cylinders.
For me, the biggest problem is my attention span. I’m the kind of person who, even if I’m watching TV, will probably pause it a few times during the episode to browse Facebook. If that’s what I’m like in my free time, you can and imagine what I’m like when I’m actually trying to do work.
While I’ll sometimes build up a good head of steam, equally often I crash and burn. The best app to help me, and the only one of these that I’ve kept on my phone, is 30:30. It’s advantage, for me personally, is the timer in the middle of the screen. It clearly tells me what I’m meant to be writing and how long I have left to finish it.
If I get bored of that, I normally have a few emails to send on any given day, so I’ll switch to that task instead. The timer will change, and it’ll give me thirty minutes to do emails before switching back and telling me to get on with my writing. It almost feels like a computer game, with various side missions taking shape in the form of my targets.
The result – shockingly – is that things get done. By helping me think about various types of work as different colourcoded targets, with set time limits, 30:30 encourages me to work at a better speed than I usually would. I’ve been using it for about a week, and it seems to be helping.
As I said before, though, some people just love that good old-fashioned feeling of ticking something off a list. There are apps that can do just that (Evernote’s Swipes – or Clear, another list app that we didn’t have space to cover), but if you’re good at sticking to a list, you’ll do just as well with a pen and paper.
If you work in a large team in a big office with a complicated working situation, you might find OmniFocus, Things or Asana useful. For me, though – a freelancer with a tiny attention span – nothing works better than 30/30.