10+ Best productivity tools every project manager should know about

Tools can’t fix everything or make you instantly more productive, but having the right tools can make a huge difference in the day-to-day life of a project manager and their team.

Here we’ve collected 10+ productivity tools for remote project managers to communicate, collaborate and manage daily tasks.

As a project manager, you probably have to juggle a lot of different types of tasks simultaneously. Besides getting your own work done of project planning, you have to manage and communicate with the team, facilitate meetings and keep people accountable. Thankfully, a lot of these tasks can be completely or partially automated these days. There are hundreds of tools out there, all promising to make your life better. However, it can be really hard to choose the best tools for your particular setup.

In this article we’ve tried to chose our favorite tools by grouping them based on the most common problems encountered by project managers.

Meeting Tools

Whether you are using Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom, you are unlikely 100% satisfied with your meeting experience on large team calls. Since the pandemic, we’ve all had to deal with back-to-back unproductive calls and zoom fatigue. However, there is now an emergence of helpful new tools to enhance the experience on any platform.

Between Google Meet Extension

Between is a completely free meeting tool designed specifically for project and product managers. It helps you have more productive and effective meetings with agendas, meeting notes, tracking attendee talk time, and managing next steps without leaving Google Meet.

Right now it is only available as a Google Meet extension, but looking to expand to Zoom and Teams very soon.

Key Features:

• Create effective meeting agendas with a timer
• Share agenda and notes live with everyone on the call
• Automatically send meeting notes to the team after the meeting
• Track talk time of all attendees in real-time
• Gather and ping missing attendees via Slack

Compatible with: Chrome, Slack

Pricing: Free

Grain for Zoom

Grain is a great tool to record, transcribe, annotate, and share highlights from Zoom meetings. Instead of using meeting notes to remember and share what happened, you can send 3-min video summaries.

Key Features:

• Add the Grain recorder to Zoom call
• Caption and clip the most important moments from your meetings
• Embed clips in your essential tools like Slack, Notion, and Asana
• Compress hour-long meetings into 3-min video summaries

Compatible with: Zoom, Slack, Notion, ClickUp, Asana, Productboard, Zapier

Pricing: You can start using Grain for free and upgrade to a pro plan at USD $15 user/month or a business plan at USD $36 user/month.

Collaboration Tools

Slack

It’s very likely you are already using Slack, but we couldn’t keep it off our list of favorite tools. Slack is used by most teams right now for asynchronous communication. It allows you to send messages to people within your organization and even invite people from the outside of your org for a particular project. One of the reasons Slack is so popular is the ability to streamline conversations into channels to keep discussions organized.

Key features:

• Attach files to messages and easily search for them later.
• Respond to messages within the same thread.
• Create separate channels for different conversations to keep everything organized.
• Invite people from outside of your organization to collaborate on a specific project.

Compatible with: Google Suite, Asana, Salesforce

Pricing: Basic plan is free, a pro plan is USD $8/user/month, and a business+ plan for USD $15/user/month.

Mural

Mural is a visual collaboration platform used by many Fortune 100 companies. It’s a fantastic tool to encourage creative brainstorming during any project.

Key features

• Choose from over 300 customizable pre-built templates and frameworks, including brainstorming, design sprints, sales discovery, and retrospectives.
• Run productive meetings & workshops with Facilitation Superpowers
• Instantly start a voice call inside any mural for a collaborative session with the Quick Talk feature.

Compatible with: Adobe, Google Calendar, Webex, Slack, OneDrive

Pricing: Mural has a free plan for up to 5 whiteboards, a team+ plan for USD $9.99/user/month, and a business plan for USD $17.99/user/month. There is a free 30-day trial for all their plans.

Miro

Miro is a virtual whiteboard and collaboration platform for distributed teams. You can brainstorm, do project planning, and team syncs in a more visual way. They have an extensive library of templates to get you started.

Key Features:

• Create, collaborate, and centralize communication for all your
  cross-functional teamwork.
• Supercharge your Agile process with remote standups, sprint plannings, and retrospectives.
• Organize all your project tasks and resources in one place. Draw dependency lines, manage workloads, and make adjustments on the fly to stay aligned and on track.
• Put your ideas into action with Kanban boards, and integrations with Jira, Asana, and more.

Price: Free plan with up to 3 boards. Team plan at USD $8/user/month and business plan at USD $16/user/month.

To-do lists

Todoist

Todoist is an easy-to-use task management tool that helps people stay on top of their deadlines and enhance their productivity. The product is flexible, easily customizable, and has a very simple and functional interface and collaboration features.

Key features

• Turn your emails into to-do tasks.
• Organize your projects in kanban style with Boards.
• Collaborate on projects by assigning tasks to others.
• Track your progress with personalized productivity trends.
• Sort and group the tasks based on the person assigned to do them.

Compatible with: Google Suite, Slack, Zapier, IFTTT

Pricing: Free plan for 5 active projects and paid plans starting from USD $3/month.

TaskBoard for Google Tasks

Google Tasks is definitely a good and easy option for Google Suite users for tracking tasks, reminders, and more. You can easily create a to-do list within your Gmail or Google Tasks app.

Key features

• Manage your to-do list right inside Gmail.
• Sort lists for tracking to-dos based on priority or different projects.
• Share your Google Tasks lists in real-time with your team with one link.
• Automatically sync your to-do list with Google Calendar
• Export your lists to Google Sheets, attach Google Drive files and Gmail emails to your tasks.

Compatible with: Google suite

Pricing: Free.

Project Management Tools

Click Up

ClickUp is quickly becoming very popular among project managers. It allows you to share information and collaborate easily both from desktop and mobile.

ClickUp combines your own to-do lists and task lists with your team’s schedule, where you can check the status of your projects, work, and comment on tasks.

Key features:

• All of your work in one place: Tasks, Docs, Chat, Goals, & more.
• Plan, track and manage any type of work with project management that adjusts to your team’s needs.
• Tag individuals or groups, assign comments for action items, and link tasks to get more done together.
• Stay aligned with your team through the Workload and Goals management feature.

Compatible with: Slack, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Clockify, Box, Google Calendar.

Pricing: Free plan up until 100MB storage, paid plans start from USD $5/user/month with unlimited storage.

Trello

Trello is a visual project management tool that helps you keep everything in one place. It allows you to manage projects, keep everyone on the same page, and assign responsibilities. Trello has started with cards and lists but has grown out to be a pretty robust project management platform.

Key Features:

• View board data from multiple angles — get a timeline view for project planning, calendar for time management, etc.
• Open any card to uncover an ecosystem of checklists, due dates, attachments, conversations, and more.
• Built-in automation, Butler, reduces the number of tedious tasks.
• Create checklists and track progress in the taskbar.

Price: Free plan available. Standard plan at USD $5/user/month. There’s a free trial available for 14 days.

Toggl

If you are looking for something very easy and simple when it comes to project management tools, Toggl is a great alternative. It is a visual project timeline and task board that helps you manage everything without stressing out.

Key features

• Plan, track, and deliver work on time without burnout.
• Visualize your team’s capacity to take on new projects using Team timelines.
• Collaborate on tasks with file attachments and feedback comments. Improve task completion quality with task checklists.
• Get started with almost zero onboarding, and keep project information up to date.

Compatible with: Toggl Track time tracking, Google Calendar, Slack

Pricing: Free plan for Solo users. Team plans start at $9/user/month.

One last thought on productivity tools

As a project manager, you might not have all the time in the world to try out and introduce new tools to the team. It might seem like a daunting task (or might seem not worth it) to get started and get buy-in. However, the right productivity tools can both save you time and help you motivate and keep the team accountable. Whether you’re looking to make your meetings run more smoothly, collaborate more effectively, or just get more time for your own work start by checking out some of the tested productivity tools above and you’ll see results really quickly. We promise.