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Eight Apps to Boost Your Productivity
Nicholas Hamm
Are you getting the most out of your smartphone? From more knowledge to great efficiencies, these apps can get you more hours in a day.
“Work smarter, not harder” the old adage goes. You already know that your phone has great potential to help you do just that, but are you really getting everything out of it that you can?
Managed Healthcare Executive took a look at eight apps that could help take you to the next level of productivity. From the tiniest inconvenience (like a sudden rainstorm) to some of the biggest headaches in your work life (like coordinating with a team on a long-term project), your phone is there to help you handle all of it.
1. Expensify
Travelling can be one of the most rewarding parts of a job, but filling out tedious expense reports can quickly make even the most exciting trip a chore.
Expensify helps to clear up some of that headache. You can scan in any of your receipts and save them all in one place. And for those who have to approve other people’s expense reports, expensify helps speed up that process by automating which purchases do or don’t have to be approved-so no more filling out a report for that $2.00 tip to your Lyft driver.
2. Trello
If you’ve spent more than five minutes trying to coordinate a project via email, you know that it can quickly become the most stressful part of your day.
Trello is an app designed to help you and a team collaborate on a task, wherever you are. To begin, set up different cards with stages of the project you’re working on-such as “working on” or “to do.” Then you can add tasks for each stage of the process, so you always know who’s handling what (and make sure nothing slips through the cracks).
3. Dark Sky
One of the best ways to be more productive is to gain control of the forces that make you unproductive. It might seem weird to see a weather app on this list, until you think about the number of times a sudden rain shower has caught you without a jacket or how often a snow shower has made you late for a meeting.
Dark Sky tracks weather down to an incredibly granular level. Want to know if it’s still going to be raining in 10 minutes? Need to know within a 20-minute window when it’s supposed to start snowing tomorrow morning? The answer is in your pocket.
4. OmniFocus
Long-term goals are vital if you want to be successful. The trick is juggling long-term goals and projects with the more immediate tasks you need accomplished right now.
OmniFocus is a to-do list that helps you keep track of everything you do, whether it’s as simple as “pick up lettuce at the store” or as complicated as “shop around for a new EHR system.” You can tell the app what’s highest on your priority list or what can be put off for a little longer. And, hopefully, finally getting on top of your to-do list can take the guesswork out of your schedule and help you get more done than ever.
5. Keeper
If you’re still entering in your passwords manually for everything, you’re wasting your time (and potentially putting yourself at risk). Password managers create and keep track of all of your passwords for you, so you don’t have to keep using the same password for everything or spend 20 minutes trying to find your login credentials for that account you created three years ago. This leaves your accounts better secured and leaves you free to throw away all of those post-it notes with passwords.
6. CamCard
Managing a stack of business cards doesn’t make sense anymore, but that doesn’t stop people from handing them out. Rather than taking them time to organize that pile by name (or worse, trying to find the name of that one person you met a month ago but whose card accidentally threw away two weeks ago), let an app sort them for you.
CamCard is a fairly simple app, but that doesn’t stop it from being useful. After you get a card, simply scan it with your phone and let the app hold the information. Then you’re free to toss the card (probably only in a place where the former cardholder won’t see you).
7. Toggl
This app is based on a simple concept-that tracking how long you spend doing tasks during the day can provide you with valuable insights. Are you spending too much time checking email? Does paperwork take you longer than you estimated?
Time tracking apps can be helpful for figuring out where you can get precious minutes of your day back, but only if you actually want to use them. Toggle makes it easy. You can sync your account to over 80 different web enabled services, from the browser on your work computer to your phone to your smartwatch. Tell the app that you’ve started a project on your computer, and you can tell it to stop tracking your time on your phone-it moves with you.
8. Resilio Sync
Chances are, you deal with sensitive files in your day to day that you might also occasionally want to share. There are tons of cloud-based options out there, but some worry about the security of the cloud.
Resilio allows you to send files directly between devices, such as your home computer and your phone, so you can have your files anywhere you need them-ensuring that you don’t have to run back to the office every time you forget something important on your work laptop.