52 Productivity Apps — Pros, Cons & Pricing
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One type of putting things off looks a lot like getting things done. You compare task managers for forty minutes, sign up for three free trials, and watch a YouTube video on Notion workflows. But you never write the email you opened your laptop to send. The apps were meant to help. That afternoon, they didn’t.
People who talk about productivity apps keep coming back to this one quiet trap. The tools are really helpful, and some of them are even great, but there are so many of them that it can be hard to choose. A writer at Buffer recently made a list of all the productivity tools they tried over the course of a year. Only nine of them stuck. This ratio is likely familiar to people who have had a lot of apps on their phone that weren’t fully set up yet.
When it comes down to it, the tools that stay useful are the ones that work when you’re tired, busy, or distracted, not just when you’re in a good mood for setting up on a Saturday morning. It’s easy to get started with Todoist, which is why it comes up in almost every serious task management conversation. When you type in a task, it shows up on your list, and the natural language processing is smart enough to turn “call dentist Thursday” into a scheduled reminder without you having to do anything extra. Cutting down on friction in that way is harder to do than it looks.
Notion lives in a completely different place. For different people, its level of flexibility can feel either freeing or suffocating. Some people use it to make complex content systems with linked databases and weekly review templates. Some people, especially those with ADHD or attention problems, spend more time making their workspace look nice than using it. It’s possible that Notion works best when you use it to keep track of things instead of every day. People who get the most out of it don’t try to run their whole lives through it. Instead, they use it for what it’s best at, which is writing, finding information, and working together as a team.
A few tools have really carved out a clear purpose for focus in particular. Along with managing tasks, TickTick has a Pomodoro timer built in, which can be helpful if you’d rather not have too many apps open at once. Brain.fm is different; it’s a music app, but the sound is designed around focus states instead of just background noise. People say that it helps them get into a working rhythm faster than a regular playlist. Whether the science behind it is sound or not is a different question. These tools are small, but over the course of a week, they add up.
This is the category that most people skip, mostly because it feels like extra work that doesn’t need to be done. The people at Toggl Track have made it feel less harsh than most. The browser add-on adds a small timer button to the web tool you’re already using, like Google Docs, Notion, or an email thread, so you don’t have to switch apps to start keeping track. Sometimes it’s helpful to see where your time really went instead of where you thought it went after looking at a weekly breakdown of where your time actually went. It’s hard not to notice how much time goes by while you do things that aren’t on your list.
One app that’s a little different is Sunsama. It’s more of a planner than a task manager, and it costs more than most of the others. The good thing about it is that it makes daily planning a habit by asking you to guess how long each task will take and alerting you when you’ve planned too much for the day. We can use that constraint. Most systems for getting things done quietly push you to add more. As Sunsama moves back a little, schedules tend to be more accurate, though it takes some getting used to.
The honest answer to “what app should I use for work?” is still “start with what you have.” Google Calendar is free, works with all devices, and blocks time as well as most paid calendar apps. Google Docs is quick, lets you work together, and doesn’t need to be set up. Most people’s lack of productivity isn’t caused by a lack of tools, but by a lack of habits. Usually, the most useful apps for getting things done are the ones that are easy to use even when you’re having a bad day, behind schedule, and distracted. They’ll still help you stay on track.
