5 Essential Productivity Apps for Business Professionals
Showing your best performance at work is made easier by the wealth of apps and resources available at your disposal today. There are productivity tools, web services, and plenty of resources to help you master each task like a seasoned professional, even when you are relatively new on the job. There are even resource centers and online courses to help you master essential skills that help catapult your career forward. Below in this article, we will cover 5 Essential Productivity Apps for Business Professionals.
Choosing the ones to use is a matter of finding the tools that suit you best. There are a lot of productivity tools to choose from indeed. To help make the search for the best apps to use easier, here are the essential productivity apps every business professional needs to consider.
Kanbanize
Kanbanize is the best project management tool to use today; it’s really that simple. As the name suggests, the tool is built on top of the popular Kanban system. You get a Kanban board along with Kanban cards to use for managing projects and tasks. That said, Kanbanize takes project management using the Kanban system to the next level.
You can, for example, create better (and more accurate) project estimates using the Monte Carlo method. What is Monte Carlo simulation? It is a way to estimate cycle time and throughput based on historical data. It is incredibly accurate, especially as you use the approach to manage more projects.
Kanbanize also makes identifying bottlenecks easy. You can use metrics like cycle time or lead time to monitor individual tasks or the whole project. You can then visualize the metrics using the Gantt chart and other visualization tools available on the platform. Once you give Kanbanize a try, no other project management tool will be good enough.
Evernote
There is no shortage of note-taking apps on the market right now. Google has Google Keep. Apple maintains its own Notes. Even solutions like Microsoft Office365 has its own note-taking app. The app you want to use for better professional performance, however, is Evernote.
Evernote is designed to be platform-agnostic. It is available for virtually every operating system, including iOS and Android. It is also compatible with a wide range of third-party plugins, including synchronization and automation services like Zapier.
One of the best things about Evernote is its seamless cloud integration. The notes you take using your iPad are instantly available across all of your devices. As long as you are connected to the internet, you can access your notes easily.
Evernote also comes with a comprehensive versioning tool. As you make changes to existing notes and add new things to an old list, you can keep track of those changes without having to remember everything manually. It’s convenient, isn’t it?
Microsoft Office365
We really love how flexible Google Docs have become. The suite of productivity apps now come with more features than ever. That said, it is still difficult to beat the fluidity of Office365 from Microsoft. Perhaps it’s the years of refinement – derived from user inputs and experience – that makes the set of productivity apps so pleasant to use.
Excel lets you manage spreadsheets like a pro. You can switch to Advanced mode and program your own routines for better automation. Word lets you handle almost all document types with ease. You also have PowerPoint for managing decks and presentations.
Office365 also offers good integration with cloud services. Every Office365 account comes with cloud storage and synchronization services. There are native mobile apps for all of your devices, which means synchronizing information across platforms is now completely seamless.
Most of the apps we have discussed so far are essential productivity apps because they are the tools you use to be productive, but Pocket is slightly different. The tool is specifically designed to make storing information and content from various sources as easy as it gets.
Since Pocket only needs to serve a specific purpose, it can be crafted to perfection. There are no bloated tools and unnecessary features to worry about. Even the user interface is designed to be very simple. Everything is laid out cleanly and clearly.
Despite the minimalistic approach, Pocket is incredibly capable. You can save articles, videos, and content from every source you can think of in an organized way. There are browser add-ons and native apps to make storing content easy, regardless of the device you use.
Pocket also makes the content you save available at all times. No wonder many C-level executives and business owners swear by this app so much; it makes learning and gathering valuable resources online very easy.
Slack
We really cannot talk about productivity apps without talking about Slack. Almost all organizations use Slack as their primary messaging app. Slack has a lot to offer, especially to organizations that need to be agile and flexible.
For starters, Slack lets you create channels based on different things, including tasks and projects. Combined with Kanbanize, Slack can be the perfect way to make sure that all projects are handled in an efficient and effective way.
Slack also comes with bots specifically designed for automating certain things. Adding daily reports, responding to certain questions, and even interacting with team members or compiling information shared in Slack channels can be fully automated using the right bots.
Another thing that Slack excels at is integration. The messaging platform works really well with other productivity tools and services. You can, for example, automate the transfer of information from Slack to Google Spreadsheet (and vice versa). All it takes is a bit of programming.
Combined with automation tools and services like Zapier, there are even more things you can achieve with Slack. Transferring files, for instance, can be as easy as setting up a routine to monitor a specific Google Drive folder and issuing a Slack notification every time a new file is added to that folder.
Master these productivity apps and you can maximize your performance as a business professional. In fact, mastery of these apps will help you boost that performance and achieve new heights. When you consider the fact that the market – and the professional landscape – is very competitive right now, mastery of these apps brings advantages you cannot afford to miss.