5 apps that increase productivity at work

Wouldn’t it be great to have a bunch of tiny, specialized assistants to shorten the time you spend on tasks, organize your notes for you and make it easier to collaborate with your colleagues? Well, they exist, they're called applications and you don’t have to look any further than your computer or smartphone to harness their helpful powers.

Here are five of apps that increase productivity at work:

Quickbooks and GoPayment

Knowing exactly where money is going in real-time would be nice, which is why Thomas Pellatt of ChiroElite recommends using Quickbooks or GoPayment. “I run a small chiropractic clinic and need things to work seamlessly to save me time. For accounting, you can't beat Intuit's Quickbooks and GoPayment. I take payments on my iPad and in seconds I can see it pop up in Quickbooks on my laptop.”

Harvest Time Tracking

An analytics app that tracks your time and nudges you to keep track of labor expenses and how much people are getting done can save you the hassle of trying to juggle time management yourself.

Harvest Time Tracking is a great option if that sounds like something you could use, says Lizzie Maldonado, a digital strategist at marketing agency The Starr Conspiracy. It’s “time tracking software with heavy-duty analytics on the backend to tell you where you might be losing productivity or where it could be improved.”

Smartsheet

Big projects can often require you to spend a lot of time updating the status of work between collaborators. With Smartsheet you can cut down on that time, though, says Jennifer Gehrt at Seattle-based Communiqué PR.

“Smartsheet serves as a centralized spot in the cloud for our team to view assignments and collaborate on projects,” says Gehrt. “The spreadsheet-inspired collaboration app features document sharing so everyone has access to the most recent versions of assignments and it provides up-to-the-minute information so team members don't have to waste time sending endless internal emails.”

RescueTime

When you’re working at a computer that also has access to the vast temptations of the Internet, it can be hard to focus on the work you need to get done. “RescueTime is a great app for making sure that you aren’t drifting off into unproductive time on your computer,” says leadership coach Jo Ilfeld. “You can block certain sites (Facebook anyone?) as well as track where you are spending your work hours.”

Evernote

As this app’s elephant head logo suggests, it’s there to help you never forget important information such as websites, documents, images, itineraries, maps and lists. If you have five to six daily meetings like Mast Digital Media's Richard Mastriani, Evernote is a lifesaver.

“Evernote allows me to document requirements and deliverable from my desktop, iPhone, and iPad,” says Mastriani. “I can then share each document with stakeholders. Sometimes these stakeholders are my 6-year-old child who has learned to send voice messages to me via Evernote from her iPhone while I am on late night sessions with my clients.”