5 Awesome Productivity Apps to Streamline Your Day

What would you do with a few extra hours per week? Everyone’s business is different, but we all deal with similar daily annoyances—forgetting passwords, dealing with repetitive tasks, losing track of time. That can add up to a lot of wasted hours better spent doing something else.

With that in mind, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite apps and tools to help streamline your workday and make the most of your limited time. Here are our 5 favorite productivity apps for everyday use. 

1. Adobe Scan

A common complaint for small businesses: too much paper!

Adobe Scan turns your phone or tablet into a portable scanner for all of your documents. It allows you to easily scan bills, business cards, receipts, or even notes you’ve jotted down on a napkin and save them as a PDF or send them via email.

The app also saves your important documents within folders that are searchable. Bonus: this app comes from Adobe, so if you’re already a user of its popular creativity software, your scans will be saved right alongside your existing documents.

How you save time: No more taking a picture of something important, or that you want to reference again, only to forget to go back into your phone and find it. 

2. Zapier/IFTTT

Zapier and IFTTT are powerful tools for automating everyday tasks and connecting apps that don’t normally play well together. Both tools are versatile and easy to use; the main difference between them is that Zapier works with a greater range of business apps while IFTTT is more consumer-focused. How you use them depends on what kinds of tasks you perform and which apps and tools you use to do those tasks. The possibilities are endless!

How you save time: Try connecting your to-do list app with your CRM so that when an important lead activity happens, it creates a task on your to-do list. Say, for example, you want to remember a particular client’s birthday, or follow up with them about their policy renewal, or check in on their anniversary as a client. If you automate the task, you won’t forget to reach out at crucial moments.

3. Pocket

We’ve all found interesting articles that we want to read when we have time. Maybe you’re in the waiting room and they call your name right when you find an interesting article that’s a 10-minute read. Pocket allows you to save articles, pictures, videos, websites and just about anything else offline so you can view them later. It’s great for catching up on reading between meetings or when you take a quick break. It even includes an audio playback feature that lets you listen to articles on the go.

Pocket is also a great tool for saving articles that you want to share on your business’ social media pages later, and its recommendation engine might just help you find new content to keep your pages active.

How you save time: No more hunting around for pages and articles from earlier in the week online that you were sure you’d remember. Open Pocket on your phone, tablet or computer, allowing you to read anywhere it’s convenient.

4. Any.do

Any.do is a to-do list, calendar and personal assistant all in one. It integrates communication and day-to-day scheduling to be the ultimate to-do list. You can share your lists with friends and family members as well as sync them across multiple devices.

How you save time: Consolidating the organization of your personal and professional lives into one easy-to-use app keeps you and your network on-task while cutting down the amount of time you spend looking at your calendar and coordinating your projects. Imagine sending your spouse a calendar invite to an event, your assistant a task list, and your client a to-do list all from the same convenient place.

5. LastPass

If you’re still using the same password for everything, it’s past time to change that habit. Re-using passwords can leave you vulnerable to all kinds of nasty consequences, so it’s important to create a strong, unique password for each service. But how can you possibly remember all of those?

LastPass is a browser extension and mobile app that helps you keep track of your passwords while keeping them secure. The interface is easy and benefits from the highest level of encryption available in the current mobile market. It also works great for teams and eliminates the hassle and security risk of sharing passwords and managing employee permissions.

How you save time: Many of our customers spend time updating password spreadsheets and sending them to different devices. Others spend an equal amount of time searching for or resetting those very same passwords. This app handles all of those problems all while keeping you safe and secure, unlike emailing around a spreadsheet or hiding a handwritten list.

Log in and start saving time.

All of these productivity apps for everyday use are easy to learn and integrate into your life. We hope using them leads you to not only finding extra time in your day but spending that time in ways to help your business grow.

If you’re looking to take even more off of your to-do list, OutboundEngine can take over the very time-consuming task of marketing your business. Our simple software makes marketing effortless. We create relevant, clickworthy content branded for your business, and then we automatically send it to your network. Our mobile app alerts you of every opportunity and our built-in follow-up templates allow you to respond quickly.

Learn more about how OutboundEngine works with a free demo.