Productivity Apps For Grads.
Productivity, organisation and efficiency are today’s buzzwords. There are countless digital tools, apps and clever software solutions that promise you will become better at what you do day in day out if you stick to using them on a regular basis and for long enough.
Over the years, I have tried a fair share of these in my own quest for increased productivity – some worked better than others, some were a complete disaster and some just made my working more complicated. Whether you like something or not is often simply a matter of personal preference, but there have been a few tools I have found genuinely useful and that have helped me up my day-to-day working game. Here they are:
Pocket is not your typical productivity tool BUT I have been using it for a few years now and have to say that it is a brilliant tool to keep my ‘stuff’ organised. What do I mean by stuff?
Well, if you are like me and like browsing the Internet for useful bits of information, ideas then Pocket is the right app for you. It works like your personal online library where you can store everything you want to read but have no time (or simply couldn’t be bothered to do so). You can also store things you read and loved and want to keep for future reference in that ‘what if it becomes useful one-day’ scenario.
You can tag every piece you save, which is great for categorisation as well as a quick search if you are looking for something. The best thing though is that once you save something in Pocket, it will stay there forever even if the original article or post is taken down. Oh, and if you pay for the premium version (it’s pennies) you can save things in Pocket and read them later offline, plus the saved article or post has none of the crazy advertising banners on it that constantly vie for your attention (and distract you from your noble goal of reading).
Notion
Notion is a useful productivity and organisation tool that I have discovered only quite recently.
Do you like making to-do lists or breaking down your big work projects into smaller tasks? How about creating checklists, agendas and random notes? Notion allows you to do all that and more.
If you want, you can literally Notion-fy your entire life from you socks drawer to your life goals with this tool: you can create separate pages for your work, travel, habits, hobbies, events and whatever else you like. The user interface is neat and allows you to personalise every page by using images and emojis provided by the well-stocked in-app library.
There is a word of caution though: Notion is one of these tools that can hook you in so much that you spend more time organising your work and making it look nice than getting anything done!
Canva
While Canva might not need many introductions – if you read this and have never used this software before I urge you to stop reading (yes, you’ve heard me right), save this post to your Pocket for later and go explore Canva now – let me just say that it is a brilliant software to unleash your inner creativity and produce fun and professional-looking images, videos, presentations, social media posts and much more.
If you are like me and you break out into cold sweats just by the mention of Photoshop (I have never been too technically inclined), Canva is the right place to start. It is easy to use and so much fun: there are countless of beautiful stock images to choose from if you go for the paid version, an unlimited amount of font colours and a great choice of different font styles from funky to serious that also support foreign languages (although, you might need to engage in some Canva wizardry with some as not all font styles work equally well with foreign alphabets). You can even use it to spruce up your CV and create your own business card.
Notability
There are so many note-taking apps out there that it is genuinely hard to pick one and stick with it. I might be one of those rare breeds who has tried Evernote and absolutely hated it, I have also tried GoodNotes and while I stuck with it for a while, I never really came round to liking it.
Then I tried Notability – the only note-taking app I like and keep coming back to. Truth to be told, I am one of these old-school souls who still prefer pen and paper and struggles to imagine going completely paperless. But at the same time, I am also one of these people who jot things down on random scraps of paper and post-it notes, places them somewhere ‘safe’ and then struggles to locate them.
I have countless notes with information of varying importance disappear without a trace into a scrap paper vortex. Notability obviously solves this issue but also does much more. I particularly like the audio recording function that allows you to record a meeting or a presentation, while you can focus on taking notes or drawing doodles (let us be honest not all meetings and presentations are worth your full attention – just saying!).
I also really like that you can write, draw and highlight things to your heart’s content making your notes look all that more appealing and inviting for future reference. One of the best Covid-19 era hacks though is that you can upload pdf documents on Notability, sign them or just overlay an image of your signature wherever it needs to go (if you do not have a stylus compatible device), and export them again as pdfs. An incredibly useful thing that has saved me a lot of hassle since working from home became the new norm in 2020.