7 Best Productivity Apps in 2024

Who doesn't want to be more productive? It is not only a matter of being a good performer in your company and a competitive candidate in the job market but also achieving the work-life balance you desire.

If you're struggling to complete multiple tasks a day or expect a full plate of tasks as you climb the career ladder, productivity apps will help you get more done in the time you have and make your life easier. And if you're in charge of a team or department, enterprise and team productivity apps will streamline tasks, save time for higher-value work, and enhance employee satisfaction.

In this post, we take you through the best productivity apps, some of them even the best free productivity apps. They help you go through your to-dos more efficiently, support collaboration, and bring structure to your day. The AI apps on the list automate repetitive tasks at scale and assist in enhancing performance and results.

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Top Productivity Apps to Boost Personal and Team Productivity

Here's a look at the individual and team productivity apps that can help you maximize your time, allow you to allocate your energy throughout the day better, and improve your effectiveness at work.

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1. Clockify - For Better Time Management

Clockify is a time-tracking and timesheet app that lets you track work hours across projects. This productive app provides timesheets on which you can load activities that you want to track hours for and add additional details like notes and tags. You can see how much time you have logged each day and week, and time spent on different projects and tasks.

The app supports your productivity by telling you where your time goes and the time you spend away from your computer. A dashboard shows productivity trends and how you spend time at work. With the app measuring the productivity of every team member, you can work towards improving time management on an individual level and boosting team productivity as a whole. This will prove especially beneficial when dealing with a high workload or short deadlines.

Clockify also supports team management by ensuring easy and accurate oversight of productivity. If someone logs in too much or too little time, the app sends you email alerts.

By accurately tracking hours in real-time, Clockify helps log billable hours to present to clients. The app works across devices, tracking time from anywhere and syncing it online.

Clockify integrates with Trello, Asana, Jira, Todoist, and other work tools. It offers four plans: a Basic plan, a Standard plan, a Pro plan, and an Enterprise plan. You can see the app in action on a free trial.

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2. Hypercontext - For More Productive Meetings

Unproductive meetings often lack a clear agenda or timeline. They can go off-topic and become chaotic, affecting team morale and wasting everyone's time. Hypercontext streamlines meetings by allowing managers and team members to collaborate on agenda, accountability, feedback, and other elements that make for productive 1-on-1 and team meetings. A Chrome extension of the app lets you manage and run meetings from your calendar and Google Meet.

Every team member has access to a shared meeting and accountability for what is discussed in the meeting. Document the next steps as you go through them in your meeting, and the app will assign, add a date, and send reminders. You can add insights to agenda items to move towards balanced conversations and keep meeting participants engaged.

During your meeting, you can document discussions and the next steps in the app. When you're done, you can easily send minutes to the team.

An ask-me-anything (AMA) feature within the app makes it simple for team members to ask questions and for you to answer them in one place. This helps build trust and is another way of keeping everyone in the know about everything that was discussed in the meeting.

At the end of the meeting, you can conduct a pulse check within Hypercontext and get feedback from team members. Questions you might ask your team include, "How would you rate this meeting?" or "How would you describe our progress towards our goals?" The app offers four plans, including a free plan.

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3. Todoist - For Efficient Task Management

Keeping track of tasks adds to our cognitive load. Todoist gets to-dos out of your head and organizes them in one place so you never have to expend mental energy on remembering what you need to do today or in the coming week. Ditto when you're collaborating on projects, sharing tasks, and helping everyone stay on track.

You can capture tasks in Todoist the moment they come to you. As you add tasks, the app recognizes dates and helps you more quickly and effortlessly build out your to-dos and schedules. Rather than picking dates, use the quick add feature to ensure you always stay on top of time-sensitive tasks.

Todoist offers productivity visualizations by week and month, keeping you glued to your goals. Activity history gives you a snapshot of account activity, which you can filter by person or project.

The productivity app also aids collaboration and makes it more efficient. You can add projects to the app, assign them a certain priority, and categorize and group similar tasks across projects under labels. In addition, you can add task descriptions along with the information and links needed to get started on them, and sections and sub-tasks to break down big tasks into manageable ones.

Todoist keeps your tasks for the day within 'Today,' provides a bird's eye view of your upcoming schedule and allows you to drag-and-drop to plan or re-plan the upcoming week or month. On the collaboration front, Todoist lets you share tasks with co-workers, assigning tasks and to-dos along with their deadlines. You can add comments, attach files, and send voice notes inside your tasks. You can manage roles and permission levels for each project within Todoist. The Business plan lets you organize up to 500 team projects, add up to 1000 team members and guests, and create 1000 project folders. Check plans and pricing here.

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4. Docusign - For Smooth and Efficient Electronic Signing

You may be no stranger to electronic signatures but does your business use a digital signature app across the board? It can be a productivity booster and standardize the agreement process. Docusign is a well-known app for electronic signatures, helping organizations automate the preparation, signing, and managing of agreements. It allows you to sign electronically on just about any device from anywhere.

This best productivity app, which has over a billion users in over 180 countries, offers templates and customizations, which lead to efficient and fast workflows, apart from standardizing the agreement process and increasing the accuracy of agreements. Once you've created a template for an agreement, you can share it with multiple users, repeatedly. Automating the agreement process this way boosts speed and productivity. You can create workflows based on the documents and contracts that need to be signed, and time them optimally for productivity gains.

Needless to say, Docusign saves you the days you would otherwise waste on waiting to receive signed documents back. Formalizing and verifying agreements faster means starting projects and accessing revenue faster. Docusign's intelligent agreement management (IAM) caters to the unique needs of organizations and individual teams, including sales, customer experience, legal, procurement, and human resources. Check out the plans here.

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5. Focus Bear - For Tuning Distractions Out

Distractions can really throw a wrench in your workday, making it hard to stay focused and get things done efficiently. With remote work becoming the new normal, it's even more important to find ways to maintain that work-life balance and minimize distractions.

The culprits often are email notifications, social media, and those nagging personal tasks. They're always there, ready to steal your attention. Productivity apps focused on helping you eliminate distractions can improve focus and enable you to get more done. Focus Bear does precisely that, supporting you in building habits to boost your productivity and achieve your desired work-life balance.

The app allows you to block time-wasting websites and apps so that you can maintain your focus on your tasks and priorities for the day. With distractions out of the way, your mind does not have to meander and come back, less focused or intent. You can create and track your daily habits in the app, which goes a long way in establishing a productive routine and making consistent progress towards your goals. You can set these goals in the app, which provides visual indicators for intuitive goal tracking.

Taking periodic breaks during the work day can improve productivity and well-being. Focus Bear encourages regular breaks, allowing you to set intervals for focus sessions and refreshing breaks. You can tailor settings to your preferred work styles, such as selecting the Pomodoro technique as your focus mode or using customizable timers. Focus Bear is available on a single plan costing $4.99 per month.

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6. LastPass - For Managing Passwords Effortlessly

How many times have you started logging into a service, only to forget your password and spend your time resetting the password or tracking it down? If you face trouble remembering passwords more frequently than you're comfortable with, you need a password manager. A password manager app is a vault that unlocks the passwords to the various applications you use on a daily basis. The vault opens to a single password (the master password), which is the only one you need to remember to access all of your passwords. The password manager app LastPass is an example.

On LastPass, you can store all of your digital passwords, and log into all of your other accounts from here, while keeping your digital information secure. It is available as a browser extension and a mobile app, which is ideal if you need to stay in touch with the office on-the-go or often need to go on business trips.

When you download the app on your phone or tablet, you will be able to sync your data across all platforms. Once your LastPass account is ready, you can unlock it with a password or your fingerprint, with more passwordless options like the LastPass Authenticator app or FIDO2 authenticators coming soon.

You can set minimum password strengths for the master password. An admin console allows the LastPass admin to oversee employee password management, update security policies, provision or deprovision users, and more. LastPass offers businesses two plans, one for teams of 50 users or less, and the other for large organizations and unlimited users.

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7. HiPeople - For More Efficient Candidate Assessments and Reference Checks

HiPeople is an AI-powered candidate assessment and reference checks platform. Its intelligent AI enables you to complete reference checks, which typically take 3-5 days, within a day. The checks are fully compliant, protected by verification and fraud detection algorithms.

HiPeople's proprietary verification algorithm checks relationships between candidates and references and verifies accordingly. Its proprietary tech spots suspicious behaviors and notifies you to take a second look at the chosen candidate. HiPeople makes reference checks really fast and easy.

The software also streamlines your hiring process by helping you gain rapid insights into job-candidate fit. You get a comprehensive test library to assess candidates on hard skills, soft skills, cognitive abilities, personality and culture, and language competency. For example, if you wanted to assess candidates on culture fit, you can run a culture fit check, and gain additional insights on candidates' preferred workplace environments, such as workplace safety, size, and furniture.

An AI-powered assessment builder recommends tests based on the job descriptions you provide. You can create questions in different formats, including video, text, or multiple-choice.

By letting you automatically test candidates and run reference checks and background checks at scale, HiPeople saves time and manual slog, while helping deliver good hiring outcomes. HiPeople offers four plans, including a free plan on which you can test unlimited candidates, access over 330 tests, and add five users. Sounds interesting? Book a demo right away!

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Give All the Best Apps for Productivity a Go

Increasing your personal, team, or department productivity is easy, thanks to the numerous productivity apps available for all devices. The ones on our list of the best productive apps can help you work faster and better. As some of them are free productivity apps, they're easily accessible to experience for an extended duration. If they become indispensable, you should consider moving to the paid plans for additional features that can bring in even better results and help you manage an increasing workload that often accompanies business growth. Here's to more productive days and results that make you smile!