Productivity Tools: Learn How to Stay Productive Online – Updated 2023

by Rawzaba Alhalabi Published on May 6, 2023

Productivity tools can be utilized to your needs and increase your online productivity. In this article, we will be giving you guidelines of how to start using these tools to your own benefit.

Any individual or enterprise should learn how to have an increase in their productivity, professionalism and more flexible usage of applications as well as a safe backup and easy access to data.

Productivity Tools to Help You Organise Yourself

Do you often lose track of tasks? Do you tend to forget important meetings and events? Is it a hassle to keep track of those sticky notes and papers? You can finally stop worrying. The following applications can be used to make your life easier.

Here are some applications that were made to help you become more organized.

ClickUp: ClickUp is an organization app that offers a comprehensive suite of productivity tools, allowing users to manage tasks, projects, goals, and notes all in one place, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency.
Evernote: Evernote is an advanced note-taking platform that can help in creating notebooks specific to the category of the notes. As well as tagging the notes accordingly for easier access. One huge benefit of Evernote is its flexibility in organizing to-do lists and assigning reminders and alarms to them. Another huge advantage of Evernote is its synchronization through all devices which helps you access your notes from almost any platform or through the web. A non-expensive addition to the Evernote set is the Moleskine custom-made notebook to easily scan your to-do lists and notes and then convert them to Evernote data.
WunderList: WunderList works similarly to Evernote, except that it handles To-do lists and reminders in a way that is slightly different. Its sharing and comment section functionalities make it the perfect platform for assigning a task list to team members and hearing their opinions or progress.
OneNote: OneNote is a free Microsoft platform that uses the concept of a notebook, where your notebooks can be renamed after subjects or categories according to your needs. An advantage that OneNote has in many touch-enabled devices, is the sketching functionality, where you can use a touch pen to take down notes and keep them in your handwriting or convert them to computer font.
IFTTT: IFTTT stands for IF THIS THEN THAT, this application helps in creating automated tasks that work without your need to open the app or supervise it. For example, setting an alarming notification on a specific day, or writing a conditional command to post a specific update on your social media.

Organizing has never been an easier task with these applications and productivity tools.

Productivity Tools to Help You Stay Focused

In today’s fast-paced and digitally connected world, productivity tools and apps have become essential companions to help individuals stay focused and accomplish more in their daily lives. These innovative solutions provide a range of features designed to enhance concentration, efficiency, and task management.

One popular tool is the Pomodoro Technique, implemented through apps like Strict Workflow, Forest, or Focus@Will, which encourage users to work in short, dedicated bursts of intense focus, followed by brief breaks. These apps utilize timers, soothing background sounds, or even virtual trees growing as a visual representation of progress, all aimed at reducing distractions and boosting productivity.

For individuals seeking to tame their digital clutter and maintain laser-like focus, tools such as Stayfocusd, Freedom, or Cold Turkey provide website and app blockers, helping to eliminate distractions by temporarily restricting access to social media, gaming sites, or other time-wasting platforms.

Essential Google Tools You Should Know About

Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, is a powerful suite of productivity tools offered by Google that has revolutionized the way individuals and teams work together. Google Drive is also perfect for storing all your data without worrying about backing them up or losing them due to an unexpected shutdown.

Google Docs: Google Docs is a document writing application that automatically saves your content while working through your document. Google Docs has almost all the functionalities needed for a Word document and even more, can be added using free third-party add-ons that can customize your documents evermore. One advantage of Google Docs is that a group of people can edit or comment simultaneously in real-time, which can be a great platform for those teams and groups that communicate online and need a writing platform to present ideas.
Google Sheets: Google Sheets can be one of the most organized sheet platforms. It has the same advantage as all the other Google Office suite programs. It is highly portable, stored on a cloud and multiple users’ collaboration has never been easier. You can also export the data to an Excel spreadsheet for maximum compatibility on most platforms.
Google Slides: Google Slides has a very simple user interface in contrast to PowerPoint. Google Slides also function more like Apple Mac’s Keynote interface, which is known for creating visually appealing slides. All other functionalities of Google office suite are also available for slides as well as improved web publishing and sharing functionalities.

Using Google Workspace would significantly increase productivity, especially in teams.

Productivity Tools for Marketing and Advertising

As individuals, corporates, and SMEs, Social Media has become a part of the daily routine and a vital pillar of successful marketing and advertising campaigns. Many social media platforms offer paid services to advertise your business or products. In this course, you will learn about methods to utilize social media platforms without paying any fees.

Marketing and Advertising can be improved using the following:

Social Media: On social media platforms, there are several keys to increasing social profiles:

Creative Content Writing: Writing the usual and common posts may attract a small set of a possibly huge audience. Therefore, writing content that may be interactive, engaging and concise may increase your followers’ interest.
Graphical Visualization: Visual aids are the key to your audiences’ hearts. Visual aids are used in presentations, conferences, speeches and many more. They help the audience grasp more quickly on the content being advertised or presented.
Knowing your audience: Depending on your type of business, your audience will differ. Therefore, it is recommended to identify the audience that you’re targeting. This helps in identifying the type of advertisement that shall be used.

Search engine optimization (SEO): SEOs are tools that help in putting websites and blogs on the top of the search engine lists. SEO applications such as Google AdWords help in easily pushing your website forward to the top of the list, but unfortunately, it is not free. Therefore, using keywords in the coding of your website or blog would help in advertising your website without any costs.

Utilizing and taking advantage of free social media and SEO tools as productivity tools are a must to help you become more productive. The tools offered by Smallpdf Templates library will simplify your work life and help you keep it more organized, which can also be added here. But they will also help you stay more competitive on the market, by discovering and using the hundreds of professional, free-of-cost templates created to speed up work.You can select from the wide range of business templates, personal reference letters, and standard or printable invoice template that will assist you in doing things in a simpler, faster, smarter way, no matter if it’s for your professional or personal life.

Productivity Tools to Help You Collect Data

ScrapingBee

Looking to gain an edge over your online competitors? Tired of spending countless hours on lead generation, endlessly copying and pasting contact details? Or perhaps you want a deeper understanding of how your customers behave when they visit your website. In any case, ScrapingBee’s web scraping service can help.

ScrapingBee’s simple API allows users to ‘scrape’ any website and returns the data in a neat, structured format — all without any of the technical hassles usually involved in the process. What kind of data is most commonly collected using a scraper? A few examples include:

Product information, such as price, description, and availability, from e-commerce websites
Real estate listings, including property details and images, from real estate websites
Job postings and company information from job search and recruitment websites
News articles and other content from news websites
User reviews and ratings from review websites
Stock prices and financial data from financial websites

Better yet, ScrapingBee’s easy-to-use tool can rotate proxies and avoid rate limiting, reducing the chances of your scraping attempts being blocked. With ScrapingBee, business owners can access (and harness) an entire universe of data while saving heaps of time

Two Common Applications that Improve Event Organization

We live in an age of technology, time has become a precious asset, and customer convenience is a necessity for a successful business. Therefore, if you or an enterprise usually plan conferences and events, as well as look for feedback from your attendees, then the productivity apps that are about to be introduced would benefit you.

Here are the two productivity applicationss for improving event organization:

Survey Monkey: Survey Monkey is an online survey tool that helps you in creating fully customizable software as well as the option to use previously made templates. It is a user-friendly interface and reliable interface that is used by many entities due to its high flexibility.
Google Forms: Google Forms is another addition of Google Workspace, it includes different sorts of options and tools that can be added to your forms, unlike survey monkey, Google Forms is mainly used for RSVP when hosting events. It can also be used for applications. An advantage that you get from using Google Forms is that it saves you a lot of time by building statistics and organizing the data automatically, which makes data entry an easier job to handle.

Surveys and RSVPs are requirements for any conference or event. You can now easily use them with these free platforms.

Productivity Tools to Help You Communicate Better

How to utilize free communication platforms increase the communication methods between both teams and individuals?

Communication is the core of a successful project. It also gives more flexibility and ease of access to information, especially to those who travel a lot or work internationally. Therefore, utilizing the following applications may help in improving communication and sharing data.

Here are two useful productivity tools for improving communication:

Skype: Skype is an online VOIP application that allows voice and video calls over the Internet. It also allows data transfers and video group chats which are all free of cost. One huge benefit of using Skype is its excellent connectivity and easily set up internet-based conferences. A huge advantage of skyping is that it allows sharing screens, which means that you can now give your presentation from home or anywhere outside the office.
WhatsApp: WhatsApp has become a part of every smartphone. Everyone who is familiar with chatting and relies on it for communication recognizes WhatsApp. A huge advantage of WhatsApp is the interface for group chat. In case you were a team leader or a team member, you can easily communicate with the rest of the team, use voice and video calls, or even share media that gets automatically saved to the group’s conversation.

Communication has never been easier with those two applications.

Seven Important Features to Look for in an Email Manager Application

Here are some major features to look for in an email manager and enhance your productivity:

Email Filtering: The software should allow you to set up rules and filters to automatically sort incoming emails into relevant folders or apply specific actions. It also includes several junk filtering mechanisms that help in cleaning the inbox from spam-based emails.
Extensions: Adding third-party extensions to enhance your email management experience, even more, is now an easy task. Theme Packs can also be used.
Saved Replies: It allows users to create and store pre-written responses, saving time and effort when frequently responding to common inquiries or requests.
Cloud Support: When attaching files that are too large for an email, the client automatically offers you the option to upload to a cloud service that would allow you to then share a link to the file in your email.
Cross-platform compatibility: Works on all the common Operating systems and devices with the ability to synchronize.
Security: If you handle confidential emails and messages that contain sensitive information, then look for a secure back-end platform that protects your inbox from any unauthorized access.
Integration with other productivity tools: Consider software that seamlessly integrates with your calendar, task management apps, and other tools you use regularly.

One of the major free email managers in the industry is Mozilla Thunderbird.

Thunderbird: is considered one of the top free email managers, Thunderbird is the easy answer to saving time when browsing emails, saving them, or looking for old emails. It can easily filter all the unnecessary emails, it also provides an important function which is the ability to add multiple email accounts and manage them separately or all together. Mozilla Thunderbird also possesses all the features mentioned earlier.

Email Management could be a hassle especially when many email accounts are being handled at the same time. Therefore, using Thunderbird would save you lots of time and effort in filtering emails.

Productivity Tools to Help You Stay Informed

In this fast-paced era, staying up to date shows your professionalism and provides you with information that may be vital to your business. It also helps in educating you about current events around the world. For example, if you work in the stock market, staying up to date with the stocks as well as the current market situation is important.

Here are some applications that help you read your news on the go:

Pocket & Medium: Both applications share a similar function of saving your favorite news and articles to view on the go in a reader’s view where no distractions such as ads, banners, or sidebars exist. Pocket also offers access to this functionality when offline. Both applications also offer access to different categories and articles.
Social Media Updates: HootSuite & Buffer: These two applications are social media managing applications that allow all your social media updates to exist on one platform that covers all your social media needs. It also allows posting to multiple social media networks at once. These applications are especially helpful to those handling both enterprise and personal social media accounts.

Forget about newspapers; utilize your smartphone for your needs.

Productivity Tools that Help With Time Management

Time Doctor: Do you sometimes wish you had more time to accomplish all the creative and productive tasks on your to-do list? Do you often wonder how your employees spend time at work? With an efficient time management software, you can save time, get more work done and boost your productivity by 22% or more.

Time Doctor is a classic example of such a time management app. It helps employers and remote teams track how much time is spent on each client, task, and project. It makes it easy for you to create a to-do list and focus on each task for an allotted duration. Apart from its accurate time tracking feature, Time Doctor also has an in-built payroll module, chat monitoring, screenshot monitoring, GPS and desktop monitoring and employee monitoring features. Its accurate dashboard generates report sheets that evaluate each team member’s level of productivity and how work hours were utilized.

Summed up briefly, Time Doctor is an excellent time management tool that boosts the productivity of remote teams through:

Helping business owners and remote teams to manage their time and maximize work hours.
Enabling you to spend adequate time on your most productive tasks and to delegate discretionary tasks to team members.
Nudging you away from distractions such as unproductive sites and apps.
Streamlining employee monitoring and employee evaluation.
Generating and emailing detailed timesheet reports for team members so that everyone can track how much time was spent on particular activities,
Providing accurate billing information for clients.

When exploring productivity tools, don’t forget to use this free online employee time clock offered by Time Clock Wizard for effective time management as well.

Productivity Tools to help you Store and Share Data

Do you often run out of storage? Do you transfer a lot of files? Do you want easy access to your data at any time? Then utilizing cloud storage platforms is the answer to your personal use and enterprise use as well.

Here are some of these cloud storage services that can be great productivity tools:

Google Drive: Google Drive is one of the top cloud storage providers as it offers an experience close to having an online computer. The drive itself stores all your data and information, but by simply using your Google email address you can get access to other Google applications such as google docs, sheets, and slides that automatically save to your drive. Using google drive on smaller devices such as tablets and smartphones also allows you to back up all your information and media automatically with almost no limit on space. It also allows you to create folders and albums to organize your data. Google Drive also works perfectly with enterprises. A function that exists in most Google applications that are sharing. It also exists on google drive, where you can share a folder or a project with only people who are allowed access to the folder or file. Other applications such as OneDrive, Dropbox, and iCloud offer similar services.

WeTransfer: With its user-friendly interface and straightforward design, WeTransfer eliminates the complexities often associated with sharing large files. By providing a seamless and intuitive experience, users can effortlessly upload files, add recipients, and send them with just a few clicks. Additionally, WeTransfer’s ability to handle large file sizes (up to 2GB in the free version and 20GB in the paid version) ensures that users can easily share high-resolution images, videos, and other multimedia content without worrying about file size limitations or slow transfer speeds.

Cloud Platforms would be the future of storage due to security from both accidents and unauthorized access.