9 Productivity Apps I Almost Use A Lot

Notes & Content

Panda:

This is my hub for design related content; news, Dribbble shots, design inspiration and the like. I'm using their Google Chrome extension currently. The most interesting feature, I think is “Focus Mode” this changes your screen into a little task list that lets you add up to five tasks, whatever you have to do at that very moment.

Readability:

Readability let’s you save web pages, specifically articles from anywhere and add that to your reading list. A global reading list that you can access from your laptop or mobile device. I’ll be honest I’m guilty of filling up my reading list with things I never read, I’ve found that if you find something and you don’t read it within 2 days of finding it then you’ll never read it. So I use Readability with some rules, I have a reading time and an item expiry time, this helps me actually read what I save.

Google Keep:

Google is biased so you won’t see an iPhone in the marketing.

Synced Notes🙌🏾 I usually try to write things in a place where I can access them on my laptop. I use Keep for that, and I have a lot of notes, organized by a lot of labels. In fact this Medium post started out as a note on Keep.

Mail

Outlook Mobile:

Outlook is my go-to mobile mail client. I have 2 personal emails and 3 work emails, a long time ago I would have all my emails forwarded to my Gmail address and configure the Gmail account to send mail as my other emails and while that worked for some time it grew out of hand because server and domain issues.
Outlook handles all my emails with ease, and it has a calendar which it got from acquiring Sunrise calendar, and it can also handle all your cloud storage accounts(I have a number of these too).

Nylas

It’s a mess, between Monday and Wednesday I received over a 100 emails.

Nylas is the native desktop home of my email. Nylas is powerful email client built with web technologies. These are my best features:
In-built read receipts: No need to go to some dodgy website, Nylas lets you know whenever anyone opens your email.
In-built Link tracking: Nylas will inform you if the link you insterted in your email is clicked. This is useful for me since I may link to my portfolio, or a shared file.
HTML & CSS Signatures: I love this feature, right now I’ve written code for my email signature but I’m using images, I hope to create it out of pure code in the future.

Cloud

Box:

I have this folder synced between my devices.

There’s a lot of storage services out there, everyone can sync to desktop these days. What makes Box standout is its enterprise level of control on files and permissions. I have good control over which folders I sync to my computer.

Office Tools

Pinterest:

Moodboards, whenever I start a project and I’m trying to collect ideas and inspiration I use Pinterest. If you follow me on Pinterest you’ll see public boards labeled by their project names. Pinterest is also easier to share too, most people have a Pinterest account even when they don’t use the service on the regular.

Google Docs:

This I use on the desktop. It’s not as powerful as Microsoft Word, in fact MS Word is much better. Now that’s out of the way let’s talk about why I like it.
1. No need for Ctrl+S, every edit saves automatically, this is bliss.
2. It’s super fast, I can go from thinking about a document to creating it in less than 10 seconds.
3. I don’t need that many features, I’m a designer, as long as it can produce a decent looking document I’m fine.

Trello:

I’ll be honest, I don’t use this as often as I’d want to. I use Trello for CRM(Customer Relationship Management), I also used it to manage my large projects (I have been working on single linear projects); whenever I needed to wrap my head around it and see the whole project at a glance. This is useful when there are several lines of production in happening in the project at the same time. I aiming to take this a step further and use it as a planning center for my business.

It’s brash but it’s done.