Marketing

– 15 min read –

May 2, 2019

Best Tools To Improve Your Productivity

Stacy Mine

Editor at Serpstat

If you are a digital expert, you are probably familiar with concentration problems. Facebook alerts, cat videos on YouTube or a new Game of Thrones episode… To make your life easier, I collected tools that will help you do more work, and save time that you can spend on yourself as well as experts' comments. Let's go!

Contents

1. Project management tools
2. Time management tools
3. Calendars and meetings
4. Checklists and notebooks
5. Keeping in order

Project management

Hubstaff is an employee time tracking software which provides you with screenshots, reporting and automated payments. Hubstaff has integrations with Asana, GitHub, Redmine, Trello and other tools.
Free, pay to get more features

Serpstat's Team Management mode allows you to assess your team's work, distribute plan limits, control Checklists, receive reports, control the staff and avoid problems with projects.

Yaware is an automatic employee time and productivity tracking software. It shows you the time your employees spend working so that you can see the working day in your company.

Teamwork is a project management software that frees teams to manage their work so they can focus on the work they do best.
Free trial, pay to get more features

ProofHub allows you to keep your projects, remote teams and clients in one place, empowering you to keep things always under your control.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Fleep has features for project communication, checklists, audio-video calling and screensharing. It has many integrations and public API.
Free, pay to get more features

Pomotodo workflow management tool allows you to save ideas, work on a plan, complete tasks and view statistics.
Free, pay to get more features

Asana allows you to monitor conversations, tasks, deadlines and any type of productivity (from information about potential customers to web development errors). Asana makes working together much easier.
Free, pay to get more features

Zoom is a tool for video conferencing, voice calls and instant messaging, which enables you to share files, upload videos and pictures, and send messages, it also works on a mobile phone.
Free, pay to get more features

Wrike is a tool for collaboration, scheduling and project management. You can allocate and organize tasks, share and access project dashboards, folders and files.
Free, pay to get more features

Trello combines project management for teams and a to-do list for personal use. All that is required is to drag special cards into different lists. A great option for organizing projects.
Free, pay to get more features

Paymo is a complex project management app that also has time tracking features. It allows you to record the time you spend working on a specific task or project right from your browser.
Free, pay to get more features

I use Harvest to track the time I've spent on various projects, and I like that it comes with a nifty visualization tool that lets you see, at a glance, how much time you've spent working on a single project. You can also use Harvest to keep track of your expenses, and make sure that you're not going over your budget.

Cherie Foo

Content Strategist at UpLead

I'd recommend TimeDoctor for tracking the productivity of your team, and RescueTime for tracking your own.

The first one works by making screenshots and monitoring the screens of employees for you to see how much time they spend working and what task they complete during that time. The second one tracks the time you spend on applications and websites, so you can later check a report and see if your online journey was productive and useful enough. Also, it allows you to block websites for some time, so you can better focus at work.

Lesley Vos

Content Architect at Bid4Papers.com

Time management

Time Doctor is a time tracking app that enables you to monitor the work of each of your team members using screenshots and screen monitoring.
Free trial, pay to get more features

RescueTime tracks the time you spend on different applications and websites. It also allows you to block sites you need for a certain period of time so that you can focus on your work.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Timely is an automatic time tracker that records how much time you spend on the tasks you do. It has GPS tracking, that helps you capture the time spent while travelling.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Focuster schedules your to-do list in your calendar, helping you maintain focus, prioritize tasks, and achieve your most important goals every day.
Free trial, pay to get more features

ManicTime helps you keep up with your employees' work, send accurate progress reports, and manage your time better.
Free, pay to get more features

Instant is a Google Analytics for life. It can keep track of the time you spent on your phone, while travelling, at places, while sleeping and on fitness activities.

Toggl is a time tracking app and a browser extension that lets you track time within more than 80 online apps. You can generate comprehensive reports so that you can understand where you spent your time.
Free trial, pay to get more features

TMetric Time Tracker is a productivity tool that tracks employees' working hours, breaks, attendances, and leaves. The tool lets you set an estimated number of hours per project or team member as well as specific monetary amounts as a project budget.
Free, pay to get more features

ClickTime lets you make use of understandable timesheets to stay on budget, reduce your costs, and increase the visibility of your projects.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Timecamp lets you track time, evaluate the performance of your team, and monitor your team members' leaves and vacation days. It also allows you to create and send pre-designed invoices to your clients, based on the hours you have tracked.
Free, pay to get more features

Harvest allows you to record every aspect of your work, such as clients, projects, tasks, notes, and more. It tracks the time you spent as well as expenses. You can use Harvest in any browser, and also as Android and iOS app.
Free, pay to get more features

Everhour is a time tracker that offers you task-based estimation, and customizable reports. Moreover, it also allows you to create invoices right from the app and keep track of the budget of your projects.
Free trial, pay to get more features

WorkPuls is a time tracking tool aimed to identify problematic staff and increase your employees' overall productivity.
Free trial, pay to get more features

We think that productivity requires a combination of tools. One which provides great benefit is the TimeTimer app for Android or iOS which assists by timing your work using the Pomodoro technique. It shows a unique visual queue that is hard to miss and enables you to focus for 25-minute chunks of time without interruption.

Zamir Javer

CEO at Jumpfactor

To stay productive, I use the PomoDone App when I'm writing content. The app helps me implement the Pomodoro Technique (traditionally a 25-minute burst of work separated by short breaks.) It's a simple tool that removes digital distractions from my life while I try and get the creative juices flowing.

Nico Prins

Launchspace

Calendars and meetings

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service. It allows you to plan, create and edit events.

GoToMeeting is an easy way to connect with people. It provides desktop sharing, and video conferencing: you can meet users, customers, clients or colleagues in real time.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Doodle makes it very easy to plan and host meetings by sending the list to all participants so that they can choose time; the time of the meeting is selected by most of them. The application can also be integrated into your calendar.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Slack makes internal communication easier, so you can set up dialogues and never miss important messages. You can send messages to your colleagues, share files and photos, make calls.
Free, pay to get more features

Checklists and notebooks

Wunderlist helps you organize your work, shopping, entertainment, and household lists. You can share your lists with your team, family, and friends. You can also set a reminder not to forget anything.

Remember the Milk is an online to-do list and task manager. It sets up the reminders in every social media and mail for you not to forget the important stuff.

Evernote is a note taking app: if you are looking for a place where you can store all your notes, presentations, articles, checks, receipts and articles, this platform will fit perfectly.
Free, pay to get more features

Taco allows you to view all your tasks on one screen as a single to-do list: it collects tasks from more than 40 different applications: Evernote, Asana, Todoist, Trello, etc.

Todoist is a functional, minimalist application that helps you cope with the necessary work and keep all tasks under control.
Free, pay to get more features

FocusList is a daily planner and focus tool based on the Pomodoro technique. It helps you plan your day, stay focused and track your time.

Keeping in order

Google Keep is a note-taking service that offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including text, lists, images, and audio.

Sanebox is an email management tool that integrates with IMAP and Exchange Web Services email accounts. It filters important email messages into a folder for later processing.
Free trial, pay to get more features

Zapier allows you to connect over 500 of your favorite apps: create Trello cards from the rows of Google tables; post upcoming events from Google Calendar to Slack; post your MailChimp campaign through LinkedIn.
Free, pay to get more features

Unroll.me lets you instantly see a list of all your subscription emails and easily unsubscribe from services you don't want

Boomerang is an email management application for Gmail that schedules and sets email reminders. It can 'boomerang' a message back to your inbox to remind you about it at the set time.
Free, pay to get more features

Pocket lets you save content that you don't have time to watch or read. The content is available on any device.

Dashlane allows you to store all relevant information in one place: your passwords, logins, etc.
Free, pay to get more features

Buffer allows you to keep up with social media services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and schedule posts when you want them to go live.
Free trial, pay to get more features

RightInbox is the go-to email productivity tool that supercharges your email inbox.
Free, pay to get more features

Unroll.me. Cleans your mailbox of unnecessary emails.

My team and I have been using Hubstaff since 2016. Their tool is simple and it doesn't take long to install it, figure it out and start using it. I often hire freelancers and if I'm paying them per hour outside of the Upwork platform, then I use Hubstaff to track their working time and productivity.

As an admin, you can set it up to take screenshots from your freelancer's screen on random time. This can show you if they're working on your project or chatting with friends on Facebook. If they are not working for 5 minutes, then the tool stops tracking working time until they're back.

Also, you can set up automatic payments through the Hubstaff platform, and that could be convenient.

Georgi Todorov

Founder of Digitalnovas

This is how I manage my own productivity:

1. I create a week planning and allocate time to each task.
2. During the week I track my own time spent using Toggl.
3. After the weekends, I reflect on how I spent my week, whether my estimations were correct or not and write down learnings. During the week, when an unexpected task comes up I tag it in Toggl. If it becomes a regular thing, perhaps I need to schedule time for it or allocate a bit more time to the "misc" slot.

As for managing our team's productivity: everyone on the team has a lot of freedom and autonomy. We don't micromanage (that doesn't scale and A-players don't like that.) We work in sprints, and make an estimate and evaluate on that after the sprint ends. If you do that you learn and get consistent output.

Steven Van Vessum

VP of Community at ContentKing

I hope that this list was useful for you! Leave your comments and suggest tools that you think may increase our productivity :)

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