Best Productivity Tools to Save Time and Money

Introduction

I’m here, working and getting ready to start writing this article.

I feel the urge to go take a coffee.

Coming back, I think about the ideas to put in this article I’m writing about productivity power tools.

Facebook has a (1) on the tab that’s open, let me check.

Just a friend asking me to play some puzzle game.

He’s such a pain in the back yard.

Now, I’m ready to get back and start this post about cool personal productivity tools.

I’m a bit hungry, actually.

No one can work with an empty stomach, am I right?

And I have some leftovers from yesterday.

30 minutes have passed since I started writing the title.

I haven’t started writing the body, though.

And this is my main issue!

I’m always getting interrupted by something.

Do you have the same mind-numbing issue?

Then this article about online productivity tools is just for you.

By reading this Mobidea Academy article, you’ll get to have access to some of the most helpful business productivity tools around.

What is a Productivity Tool?

A productivity tool is a tool that will help you get faster, more efficient, work with a higher quality, be more organized, and fight procrastination.

Productivity management tools allow you to be the best professional you can be so continue reading to understand which ones are world class!

What are the Different Types of Productivity Tools?

There are several types of Productivity Tools you can find online.

These are the most common types of productivity tools:

• Time control
• Task management
• Website-blocker

Bear in mind that – on average – humans need around 20 minutes to be totally focused again on the task they were performing before being distracted.

Now let’s see if I can make you save some time by showing you a list of productivity tools that I’ve found and tested myself.

Why are Productivity Tools Important?

In my case, the tools I needed were oriented for task management.

Before I found some helpful entreprise productivity tools, I was a real mess.

I was unable to deal with the number of incoming tasks that were coming straight at me every single day.

Moreover, in order to catch up, I started working more hours, until pretty late, and including on weekends, and holidays.

Yup, that’s right.

It just couldn’t be.

I needed to be able to find tools for productivity as soon as I could.

I started researching and testing some productivity tools.

I found the ones that suited me best and now I’m super focused and more organized than ever before.

I get to plan my tasks better and save precious time!

Plus:

My work has more quality.

Believe me, it’s worth spending some time trying to figure out the best solution for your problem.

Why?

Because – by using some work productivity tools – you’ll get to save time and become a better professional, whatever you choose to do!

I’ll now give you a list that’ll blow your mind!

You’ll have the chance to understand what are the best productivity tools for entrepreneurs.

They’re rated from 1 to 5 so check them out and pick your favorite!

List of The Best Productivity Tools

1. Strict Workflow

Rating: 4

Price: Free

Installation: Browser Extension

With Strict Workflow, you’ll have a 2 in 1.

First, this productivity tool uses the Pomodoro Technique.

What’s that?

It’s an old technique that organizes your time by periods.

Take a pencil, take a piece of paper.

Write down, on a checklist, the tasks you need to perform.

Now start to work.

You’ll work for 25 minutes upon the completion of the task.

Then, rest for 5 minutes.

Those 25+5 minutes form a “pomodoro”.

After four pomodoros, take a longer break, of 15-30 minutes.

You can apply this technique in the old-fashioned way:

Using a classy kitchen timer.

You can also decide to go modern with Strict Flow.

With this tool, you can also block websites that you know are distracting you from your ambitious goals.

Every time you try to enter one of those websites during work periods, the message written on the image above will appear.

2. Asana

Rating: 5

Price: Free (up to 15 team members) or 6.25$ a month per user

Installation: SaaS

Asana is one of the best task management tools you can use.

This is basically the productivity tools definition you were looking for!

She (yes, I decided that this productivity tool is a girl) also helps you manage tasks that you delegate to your team.

You can even consider it one of the best team productivity tools around.

The logic is pretty simple:

First, you create a project.

Let’s say your project is to “Fire Arnold”.

Then, you create tasks inside it.

Let’s pretend that the task within the major task is as follows:

• Find an excuse to fire him
• Plan for a replacement
• Prepare the conversation beforehand, so as to make sure you know how to react in case he decides to break a chair on your back

Then, on each task, you’ll allocate a person.

You’ll also have a deadline and you can insert more details into the description.

You’ll find a whole bunch of small options:

Set tasks as “Favorite”, create subtasks, create chats inside of each task or projects and so on.

The deadlines are super easy to check, thanks to a very user-friendly calendar.

The best thing about this awesome tool for productivity?

Its remarkably smooth usability.

In fact, it’s easy to navigate, to set the tasks and to manage them.

Believe me:

You’ll become able to maintain a high level of perfectly organized momentum by using Asana.

3. Trello

Rating: 4

Pricing: the Free version is enough (or it can go up to 10$ monthly, per user)

Installation: SaaS

I really love task management softwares.

Trello is the one that follows!

It’s a bit different from Asana but also quite helpful.

Trello’s structure is slightly different:

You’ve got your board (you can create several of them) where you start to create lists that’ll always be listed horizontally, as you keep creating new ones.

On each list, you can put cards that’ll be displayed vertically, below each list you create.

Here’s an example:

As you can see, Trello is hyper visual.

For each board, you’ll get to see a menu on your right.

That’s where you’ll check the activity of the board, change the settings, see the participants, etc.

It’s all pretty simple, as you can see.

Don’t get it and want to be able to use Trello like it’s second nature?

There’s a great tutorial here.

Complete the cards, finish the lists, close the board and go to bed.

Your work is done, sire!

There’s more coming your way tomorrow morning.

4. Checky

Rating: 3

Pricing: Free (and you’ll save your smartphone’s battery to boot)

Installation: Mobile App

Remember about that very controlling girlfriend you had in High School, controlling every step of yours, and when you pulled out your phone from your pocket she was like “Hey, what are you doing?”

Well…

Meet Checky!

She (I’ve decided that Checky is also a female since she reminds me about this crazy vixen I used to date) can track the number of times you pull out the phone from your pocket.

That’s right!

She’ll know exactly where you did that.

The purpose?

Nowadays, taking the phone from your pocket has become a reflex.

It’s just part of being a popular guy in the twenty-first century.

Sometimes, you fail to understand why you checked your phone.

It’s distracting and makes you waste time.

Time which could be spent working.

The phone is now an extension of our arm (pretty poetic).

With Checky, you’ll be able to control this reflex.

You can say to yourself:

“I don’t want to check my phone more than 50 times today.”

It’s simple, isn’t it?

For those of you who are addicted to your mobile phone, it can be super helpful too!

5. RescueTime

Rating: 4

Pricing: Free

Installation: SaaS

Let’s continue with these awesome softwares that track your daily habits.

RescueTime time!

RescueTime will run on the background and give you a full picture of the time you’ve spent on different website categories (as you can see on the image below) according to the period you want.

Since it’s also available for mobile devices, it can track the time you spend on different apps.

One of the very interesting features of RescueTime is the possibility to set alerts when you spend a specific amount of time on entertainment websites.

If you get too lazy, this image will popup!

The report part is very interesting and it really draws your full attention.

You can see the proportion of time spent on “good websites” vs. entertainment websites per hour or day.

It also gives you a “productivity pulse” or “productivity ratio”.

You’ve got the possibility to receive a weekly summary and you can set the Productivity Pulse goal for you.

To be honest, the Premium version isn’t really worth it, even though it’s cheap ($9/month).

It can give you the possibility to block websites (but for that, I’ll give you another tool from my free productivity tools quiver).

The premium version also allows you to receive notifications or track offline activity.

Want to check another one of my awesome sales productivity tools?

Timewaste Timer, then!

6. Timewaste Timer

Rating: 3

Pricing: Free

Installation: Browser Extension (only for Google Chrome)

This is the most straightforward productivity tool of all time:

If you spend more than one hour per day on Facebook, you’ll pay $1.

The main goal of this tool?

To ensure you don’t spend too much time on Facebook.

By having to pay one buck, you’ll definitely try to avoid the intoxicating social network and its claws.

Once you install the extension, you can deposit $5 on your account.

The money you pay will go directly to the owners of the product.

It’s fair, because it allows them to create more amazing productivity tools like this one.

7. Habitica

Rating: 5

Pricing: Free (the subscription costs $5 but it doesn’t bring any real advantage)

Installation: SaaS and app (Android and iOS)

I must confess that this is my favorite productivity tool.

If you’re a lazy RPG-addicted grown man, then this tool is the one for you.

It’s actually more like a life gamification.

Basically, you turn your life into a Role Playing Game.

You’ll have your character, set specific earnings for the actions, and buy things with what you’ve earned.

Let’s dig into it a bit.

You start by creating your Avatar, for the fans, very Final Fantasyish.

You have a health bar and an experience bar.

Afterwards, you start to create your tasks that are divided into Habits, Dailies and To-Dos.

Habits are…well, habits to do or to avoid such as Take The Stairs or Watch A Reality TV Show (this is the one to avoid, of course).

By performing the tasks to avoid, you lose health.

“Dailies” are the daily tasks you have such as Walk The Dog or Wash The Dishes.

The To-Dos are the one-shot tasks you have:

Prepare a Lecture, Redecorate the Living Room and so on.

By performing all those tasks, you get experience and coins.

Experience makes you level up and coins allow you to buy Weapons, Armor, Health Potions or simply time to make non-performing tasks such as play Playstation for one hour or Watch TV for one hour.

The “game” has many more specificities but this should be enough to have an idea of what it looks like and its purpose.

This actually relies a lot on your honesty.

The truth is you can lie and say that you didn’t get Fast Food when you actually got two McDonald’s menus.

Don’t cheat, bro!

Be reasonable and enjoy Habitica.

8. Productivity Owl

Rating: 4

Pricing: Free

Installation: Browser Extension

Very simple, very efficient.

This tool will simply allow you to create a blacklist of websites that aren’t productivity-friendly.

Once you’re on one of those websites, the owl will sit in the page’s corner to control you.

It’s scary, dude!

When you spend a specific amount of time on those websites, it’ll fly across the page and close the tab.

You can always save it for later, in case you don’t want to forget about the page that was closed.

You can also schedule the Free-Time periods so you can browse on any page you want.

9. Todoist

Rating: 4

Pricing: Free (premium isn’t worth it)

Installation: Available as an SaaS and app (for mobile and tablet)

Todoist is a very simple and appealing Task Manager.

You create your projects and tasks and those can be then shared with more people.

As you can see on the image below, the left menu showcases all the projects.

By clicking each one, you’ll see the tasks inside.

Every time you create a task, you set a date for it to be accomplished.

On the Inbox, you’ll get to check all your tasks.

If you want to start planning your day, select Today to see what must be done ASAP.

If you have too many tasks, you can always prioritize them into four levels (by exploring “Filters”).

In order to see how productive you are, this productivity tool presents you with the Karma system.

The Karma system will show you a daily trendline.

The latter will allow you to understand how effective you happen to be when it comes to actually completing the tasks.

Summing up, Todoist is a simple and intuitive task manager that I actually enjoyed using.

10. Freedom

Rating: 4

Pricing: $2.42/month

Installation: App (both for desktop and mobile devices)

If you didn’t like the previous website-blockers, let me show you another one:

Freedom.

It’s very easy to use and quite straightforward.

Here’s how it works:

You start by setting your blocklists.

A blocklist can be set by category.

In fact, that’s the best way to do it.

Afterwards, you can set schedules to apply the blocklists or simply apply the filters for the next x or y minutes.

For each session, you can set which blocklists you want applied and for which devices.

You may have a blocklist called “news” (with several news websites, obviously) but – for the next session – you don’t mind visiting those websites.

Freedom’s got a great interface.

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s super simple but very effective.

11. Go Fucking Work

Rating: 3

Pricing: Free

Installation: Extension (only for Google Chrome)

Are you a proudly Catholic person?

Then I suggest you scroll down.

Fast.

This tool is the strict army-veteran father you’d be afraid to look at!

This straightforward tool for productivity is one of those technology productivity tools that tells you to go WORK.

Simple:

Set the list of unproductive websites, define for how long you want your session to last.

Then, every time you want to visit one of those websites, the tool will tell you to go back to work, you lazy bastard!

Personally, I love it.

Conclusion

After reading this list, I hope you’ll find the best productivity tools and get ready to work like an optimal robot!

This productivity tools list will allow you to find something that suits you, for sure!

The goal?

To ensure you become more effective and productive.

At the beginning, you may find it hard to adapt your daily tasks to the new tool you’re testing but believe me:

In the end, it’ll be worth it!

There are a whole lotta things out there taunting us and letting us lose focus every single day.

These tools for productivity allow you to put a stop to that.

Meaning?

Time to fight procrastination and get to do your thang!