The 5 Apps That Help me Stay Productive

Nadine
4 min readApr 1, 2023

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TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, and Pinterest are all apps that can steal a lot of time out of your day, but other apps do the opposite. Here are the 5 Productivity boosting apps that I use.

Notion: Notion is a note-taking and productivity app and for me one of the most powerful tools to stay productive. Here, I have also written about how Notion can help you to be more productive.

With Notion, you can create to-do lists, databases, notes, and more. The app, lets you organize your next project, blog article, or daily journal.

I use the app to keep track of all the books that I read, write down all my ideas and insights, and manage my to-do's.

If you want to go a step further you can even use it as a project management tool for a company (it is that powerful).

I use Notion daily for various tasks and it is my number one for staying productive (and it is free).

Photo by Team Nocoloco on Unsplash

Microsoft To Do: Outside my private life, I use Microsoft To Do. Microsoft To Do is a task management app that lets you create to-do lists. Which, at first does not sound too exciting.

The game changer for me was that it integrates with Microsoft Outlook.

So if you have a task from an e-mail you just have to flag the e-mail for follow-up (on the right side, beside the E-mail title).

Then the flagged e-mail gets immediately imported to your Microsoft To Do App.

And TA-DA, from here you can do almost anything with it.

From adding sub-tasks, uploading files, writing notes, organizing the tasks in sub-categories, and setting due dates — all that and more is possible.

If you are using the app consistently it is almost impossible to forget a thing. This has been really helpful for me over the past months.

Headspace: There are lots of studies on how meditation can improve your mental clarity and make you more productive and I have experienced that as well.

I’ve been using Headspace as a meditation app since 2016. The app offers meditation courses on various topics such as Gratitude, Anxiety, or Stress. The team has added additional content over the years e.g. they recently introduced Yoga Sessions and Focus music, so there is a lot to discover.

You can learn the basics for free but I think the Premium version can offer even more value. You can use this buddy link to get free 30 days of Premium access (instead of 14 days).

I don’t get anything from that, Headspace is just my favorite meditation app that I like to share with you.

Photo by Katerina May on Unsplash

Calorie Tracking: I have tried many calorie-tracking apps such as Lifesum, MyFitnessPal, and Yazio and I think they all do a good job.

Lifesum is the app that I currently use as they have a good-looking app design and I like the recipe selection.

These apps also integrate with your fitness tracker or smartwatch so you know how many calories you need on a given day.

For me, tracking calories is helpful to just stay mindful of what I am eating and not get sloppy with my eating behavior.

Photo by Eiliv Aceron on Unsplash

Google Calendar App — I’ve been using the Google Calendar App for many years now and I don’t even know how you can organize your life without an online calendar.

The even bigger value comes from the shared calendar function that I use with my partner.

Keeping track of our holiday plans, meetings with friends, invitations, etc. would not be possible without this app.

So these are the 5 apps that I use every day to stay productive. Let me know what your apps are! Please clap for the article and follow me if you liked it.

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Nadine

Aspiring writer, information risk manager and tech enthusiast; Mastodon: @ me.dm/@nadinebliedung Twitter: https://twitter.com/Natschun