5 Well-Designed Productivity Tools
What makes the helpful apps so good?
As a kid I was taking music school lessons 4 times a week, performed in a band, and studied two foreign languages in a secondary school — altogether it was just about 45 working hours. I also didn’t possess a smartphone to keep me up with the tight schedule (none of us did back then). My productivity tool was my mom.
Today I spend these 45 hours a week on planning, reading, writing, and pitching. And about the same amount of time goes to digital distractions — unless I stick to my NY resolutions and productivity tools.
The latter recently came up in a conversation with workaholic designers. It sparked the question, the argument, and then the idea for this article: how come these web apps are able to influence our productivity and provide efficient help? What can we learn about helpful design from the interface of helpful apps?
So here it goes: a home-grown analysis of 5 productivity apps that I regularly use and enjoy. These are also the apps you’ve likely never heard of. Let’s look at them from a design standpoint as well as from consistent personal use, and see how they build a sustainable user experience.
Mixing the vibe with Noisli
Many of us office workers use music and nature recordings to block out either humming noise or dead silence of a workspace, homespace, remotespace — wherever we find ourselves these days.
Noisli is one of those browser apps that offer a non-distracting audio background: calming sounds of waves and rustling of the leaves, mild noise of coffeeshop, monotonous rambling of the train, and even a humming of a working washing machine (that was probably reserved for pure aesthetes).
What makes it special, though, is that Noisli pieces 28 separate sounds in several playlist combinations and enables users to “cook” the audio atmosphere the way they want. You can edit the existing playlist or create a new one, choosing and tuning any sound to your individual liking. I am actually running a slightly adjusted Creative Thinking playlist as these words are being written.
Duly noted:
The free tier only allows for 90 minutes of playback a day with limited sounds. That’s enough to test Noisly out, but if the goal is to install a routine audio background once and for all, you are going to pay about $10/mo for unlimited use.
But to sweeten the pot there are extra features like oscillation, which makes separate “sound ingredients” of the playback smoothly fade or enhance from time to time, creating a nature-like variation.
What to love:
I started ****using Noisli as a browser extension: choosing a playlist and setting a timer in a tiny pop-up. After a couple of months, I’ve discovered that opening Noisli in a tab contains not only a sound tuning interface but also a lovely digital notepad with a smoothly changing gradient background, which swiftly dissolves all the buttons as soon as you start typing. Audio and visuals intertwined to remove any distractions at all = a really pleasant way to jot down ideas.
The UX takeaway:
Noisli is a great example of an app that succeeded at combining features together. It is not a random collection of all perks that Noisli developers were able to build, but a set of tools centered on one task: build a digital place for focus. Essentially it is not a Pomodoro timer, background audio service, or a notepad. It is rather a mindset sandbox — sophisticated enough to give the user control and simple enough to support peace of mind.
Sending fancy invoices with Lano
Honestly, if I had to point a key difference from the other invoicing apps, I’d say “the lack of excessive bells and whistles”. Payment documentation is not an area where you experiment a lot, and once you find a good tool, you settle. Lano is certainly a good tool that allows you to:
- input your customer/vendor details just once
- save your banking info just once
- easily generate the pre-designed invoices
- … and send them by email just pressing the button from the dashboard, no export required.
Duly noted:
As a creative contractor, I just want to get a compliant and solid-looking invoice blank. I don’t use the Timesheets and Insurance tabs but checked them out for this article. They provide two extra tools for dedicated freelancers. Timesheet is basically space to input projects you are working on, you will be able to use that info for filling in the invoice. Also, if you are traveling a lot you might benefit from global insurance with a nice 15% discount for Lano users.
What to love:
With Lano, creating invoices stopped to be a chore. Mainly because with all the automation it takes me ~30 seconds to fill in and press “send”.
The pipeline that shows the current status of a particular document can be configured to your needs (for example, my accounting is very simple and I only have 4 steps, compared to the enterprise process of 7 on the example image). So even when you handle several projects or vendors simultaneously, you have an out-of-the-box report on all of them — a piece of cake, comparing to tacking them all over the inbox.
The UX takeaway:
To be totally earnest, the UI is not 100% perfect with this app, it is rather 87%-ish. But with a fully functional MVP those micro-issues are not noticeable. Something to think about: if a platform is still in development but tries to dazzle the user with multiple applications, it is more likely to disappoint. Starting with the bare minimum that responds to the target audience’s needs you’ll at the very least get a simple and predictable tool that is just fine.
Scheduling appointments with calendly
The gist of the app:
- I define the hours when I’m available to talk;
- You pick the time that fits your schedule best;
- Booking is available through a personalized link, an embedded section on a website, or even a chatbot;
- The time slots are responsive — the interface will show my vacant slots in your local timezone.
The team behind the app did a great job with integrations, connecting it seamlessly with video conferencing tools, CRM & analytics, payment platforms, and more.
Duly noted:
A free tier covers pretty much everything I needed for a full user experience, but there are also Premium and Pro paid(moderately priced) options for customization and multiple calendars per user (in case you really fall in love with the platform).
The reasonable question would be, how is that different from just scheduling a meeting through a calendar? And the answer would be “not much” — in case you run a special shared calendar account meticulously blocking out all unavailable time slots for sleeping, training, having lunch, and tracking your other meetings, concealed as just “busy” time in case you are not willing to share your agenda with everyone out there. Calendly interface shifts the paradigm: you only have to define the convenient time. And whoever is interested in booking it will only see the slots that are left free, not your full timetable.
What to love:
calendly feels as if it was designed with 1–1 appointments in mind. In my experience dialogues proved to be more efficient than group meetings. Worst-case scenario, even if a call turns out to be a total waste of time, it is fewer cumulative hours wasted if there were just two people engaged, not eight.
That said, you can add more participants. But — and this is a personal note from the author — think twice if it is really necessary, right?
The UX takeaway:
A scheduling platform sounds like a routine, unimaginative niche. But calendly found a core pain point for scheduling a conversation across timezones and work hours — matching the available time slots, keeping the rest discreet. Along with unobtrusive and minimalist design they managed to create a tool that 8 000 000 users now regularly depend on.
Blocking the distraction websites with GFW
Probably the only app that could be described as both profane and effective — Go F**king Work. This chrome extension is free, black&white, and very direct.
When added to a browser it asks you to list the websites that mess up with your productivity, the times you’re not working, or break timer.
Advanced options allow forcing the page to refresh once the break time is up and overriding blacklist — like blocking Facebook, but keeping access to your company page for work.
Clicking the extension icon will bring up a timer with settings and a pause option. Very simple. Now try and log into that Netflix — GFW will take no excuses and send you off to your task with a random insulting quote.
Duly noted:
If you are sensitive to the F-word you already know should probably not use GFW. Same goes if your coworkers or family might see your screen with a blocked website and be offended by a coarse note telling you to go back to business.
What to love:
GFW is localized with an utter passion by the app fans. You can pick French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, or Indian — each insult quote in these languages is not a translation from the original, it is truly crafted considering the correspondent culture.
The UX takeaway:
The whole GFW thing was created solo by Alexander Lam and despite being labeled as “Mature content” label on the Chrome web store has more than 10 000 users now. That’s thousands of people who appreciate the blunt encouragement to be productive. On the design part, strong uppercase font and monochrome palette complement the effect, keeping your thoughts from wandering away.
Freeing up the inbox with Unroll.me
I remember signing up for Unroll.me back in university days when I only had one inbox. The app’s purpose is to help you get rid of subscriptions you don’t want anymore — I guess busy people in digital environment can relate.
Instead of going to every newsletter and looking for an “unsubscribe” button, I just allowed Unroll.me to access my inbox and then selected all those I wanted to kick out. Effectively this one-button push equals to the annoying one-by-one unsubscribing — you won’t see these emails again.
There is also a middle-ground solution: “roll up” the subscriptions you want to see but not as separate emails demanding attention and disrupting your work hours. “Rolled up” subscriptions are delivered to your inbox combined in a once-daily digest.
Duly noted:
If you click a subheader on a homepage to find out why Unroll.me is free, a friendly pop-up will let you know that the app analyzes purchase data from commercial emails. This data is depersonificated, of course, and the algorithm doesn’t parse personal communications. Still, it is a point to consider if you’re heavy on privacy. And points for the app for bringing this out front.
What to love:
You launch the app thinking that it will help you to remove in one click those 8–12 regular newsletters — the ones you keep deleting without reading. But in a minute you end up waiving away a few hundreds of old signups or shop emails. You’ve never realized how huge (and irrelevant) your subscription footprint is until seeing the tab with all removed items. It is both a strange and liberating feeling.
The UX takeaway:
Unroll.me is the simplest thing with the interface of a single column table and three actions for each row: keep it, roll it, or toss it. And yet, the plain functionality of the app makes you wonder out loud why the mail clients don’t have something similar built-in.
As far as the value proposition goes, this app addresses the e-mail part of digital hygiene, or “cleaning up the virtual assets you consume”. It is smarter to clean up the signups than deleting inbound messages post-factum. Unroll.me serves the minimalist mindset with a minimalist interface — a decidedly consistent approach.
Learning from the things that work.
There are so many productivity apps out there — for taking notes, writing better, bookmarking interesting stuff, and more. This list of five is far from the ultimate setup.
Use the ones you love or explore the new ones and find what makes them helpful at scale. These findings can become great leverage for your understanding of user experience.
Originally published at https://dops.digital.
