Office workers spend a jaw-dropping 1,700 hours a year in front of a computer – and that’s just in the US. A lot of that time is inherently low-value, spent managing work tools, reacting to email or browsing unproductive websites. But equally, a lot of it is just poorly managed.
From dropping work to answer a new email, to trapping 30-minute intervals between meetings – our behaviour ultimately determines the productive potential of our time. But with the help of smart technology, we can all make it go a little further.
While there are a ton tools promising to turn your productivity around, not all of them are created equal. To help cut through the noise, here’s our pic of the 11 best productivity apps for mac.
Mac open apps from anywhere. Begin by entering the actions menu, hold down the Control key on the keyboard and click the icon (or simply right-click it), and then choose Open from the list.
7 Best Productivity Apps on Mac for a More Effortless Workflow in 2020 Stay on track with your work goals using these Mac productivity apps By Newsweek AMPLIFY On 10/3/20 at 9:00 AM EDT. Sep 23, 2020 Best Productivity Apps For Mac. I have a demanding job as a sales executive, a family with two kids, I’m a blogger, and I workout 4-5x a week. Doing all that requires dedication and brutal efficiency.
Billed as your personal assistant for doing deep work, Dewo is all about creating and protecting space for the cognitively demanding work that drives you forward. Aside from breaking down your deep work across weekdays, locations and apps, Dewo can actively help you do more of it. It uses AI to trigger “Do not disturb” mode across your devices once you reach deep work, and reschedule meetings for a more focused working week. While still in beta, it offers a unique approach to solving the problems of modern knowledge work – and it’s completely free!
Working across multiple windows or tabs makes for a cluttered rabbit warren of a workspace. Magnet solves this by helping you configure a neater arrangement, locking windows to the side of your screen wherever you drag them. It’s a great way to quickly organize your view so you can focus on what matters. Its predefined keyboard shortcuts are particularly handy when transferring text and files from one app to another.
Serving as an easy alternative to Evernote for Mac, Bear Notes organizes your thoughts intuitively. Write down your notes, and then use hashtags to “organize” your thinking. You can also use its native to-dos to stay on track with your tasks across other Apple devices.
Timely automates your essential admin, so you can get back to actual productive work. It tracks everything you do on your Mac and uses AI to draft time sheets for you – solving the inaccuracy and effort of traditional manual time tracking. All your data is fed in to a private timeline, which essentially holds up a mirror to the way you work – useful for seeing how long you spend in different apps, quantifying time on tasks and identifying processes that are eating into your day. In case your work involves a lot of travel, there’s even the option to track your locations with its counterpart iOS and Android apps.
X.ai lets you cut out the painful back-and-forth of meeting scheduling. Connecting to your calendar and email, it can book meetings with anyone in your network with a single click or word. Promising to help you reach “scheduling nirvana”, it’s another no-brainer tool for automating the shallow work that eats into the time available for productive deep work.
“Designed with performance and intuitive interaction in mind”, Airmail dissolves the admin barriers involved with managing several accounts. It consolidates your accounts in a user-friendly format, allowing you to switch effortlessly between email accounts. As an added bonus, it also lets you quickly turn your emails into tasks and notes.
“Used and loved by squillions of people worldwide”, Alfred fills the gap between Siri and Spotlight, automating small admin tasks and performing advanced functions. You can use the Clipboard History to find any text, file or image you copied earlier, or create your own snippets and enter a personal abbreviation to archive them. Way more effective than typing it all out – essential for reducing duplicated effort!
This is a terrific alternative to the cost of Photoshop, and miles better than most free image-editing apps. Draw, paint, resize, crop and add effects to your images, or customize your own effects and save them for later. While it’s not as powerful or extensive as Sketch and Photoshop, you can quickly correct images and rearrange compositional objects – making it an ideal tool for marketing and sales teams who might not need the heavyweight alternatives.
Creative people know that good ideas often spill out into other ones. Rather than trying to keep up by writing them all down as quickly as possible, why not use an app that pilots a clear run-on of your creativity? Through MindNode, you can personalize your own “mind map” and make sense of your thoughts.
Available on Mac and iOS, Things dives deeper into to-dos by creating tags, timeframes, and deadlines. Once you’ve made your morning plan, you can build your agenda and consolidate calendar events with a simple drag-and-drop. One of its newest features is Slim Mode, which allows you to collapse your sidebar to cull distractions – great if you’re working in split view.
Ulysses if a fully-fledged writing tool, designed to support copywriters create publication perfect text. The app quickly transforms text into beautiful PDFs, eBooks and other files, with styling and spacing intact. It also offers fun incentive-focused features, like seeing how close you are to your word count limit, alongside powerful styling features, like markup-based text editors.
Best productivity apps guarantee best working environment! Have you ever thought how much time do you waste on typing and clicking, organizing files, and trying to find the date? It’s time to put your laptop to work with this list of 15 best productivity apps for Mac.
Sometimes you don’t need full-screen apps with lots of features to improve your productivity. Instead, have a look at these small tools that do one-two things and make your life easier.
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Krisp is an easy-to-use but powerful app that recognizes your voice and separates it from extraneous noise next to you, leaving only your clean voice. It’s one of the best productivity apps for Mac that can help you to have better conference calls. You can work from any place that’s convenient for you and don’t worry about the crying baby or airport announcement in the background. Krisp also launched on Appsumo Deals.
To be productive means having an organized workplace. Magnet app does exactly that – organizes the space on your desktop. This small app allows you to drag windows to show two, three, or four apps side-by-side.
Having multiple windows side by side eliminates the neebad for app switching and enhances your multitasking. Organize your workspace and seamlessly copy the text from one window and paste it into the second one. You can also customize the shortcuts for the app for maximum efficiency.
Price: $1.19
Have you ever wondered why your Mac doesn’t show full date on menubar? We have. While we don’t know the exact reason why Mac doesn’t support this function natively, we’ve found a good solution with this nice productivity app.
Itsycal adds a small calendar on your menubar. With it you can always have a brief glance at the whole month, week, your day and even appointments. It integrates with your macOS calendar and reminders, and you can modify the appearance if you wish too.
Price: Free
Sometimes you have to work during night or in place with bad lighting. For these situations use Flux – productivity app for Mac that changes the brightness and color temperature of your display. It matches them with the time of the day, so you call work better and feel less tired.
Price: Free
If you can’t resist the urge to check your Facebook, Twitter or any other website you stick for hours – this tool is for you. SelfControl app helps us to save us from meaningless waste of time of these websites.
Simply add the websites which distract you from your work, set the timer and turn it on. The app will block the mentioned sites for the specified time.
The best part is that even if you reboot your Mac, you can’t turn off the application until the timer’s up. So if your “selfcontrol” is not enough, use this small tool to be more productive with your time.
Price: Free
This productivity app is all about managing your tasks. OmniFocus has a clean interface and every feature you need to get stuff done. And its sleek design is simply a perfect match for your Mac.
Add all your projects, to-do lists into OmniFocus and track all details like dates, notes, files attachments. Also you can easily synchronize between your iPhone or iPad. Free up your mind from storing all your tasks and enemies of every good conference call.
One of mac productivity apps in this list is called Bear. It’s a beautiful and flexible note-taking app. It has all functions that you’ve wished the pre-installed Notes on Mac would had.
With Bear it’s super easy to jot down your notes on the go. Write prose and outlines, create to-do lists and reminders for yourself, and many more. The best part is that many functions of Bear are free and you can enjoy all the perks without spending much.
Price: Free ($1.49 monthly)
CleanMyMac is a lifesaver for your Mac. It combines many optimization tools in single app. Monitor the performance, remove malware and clean up your macOS.
This is a must-have app for any Mac user if you want your device to be healthy. And you want it, right?
Price: One year subscription costs $49.95
Alfred brings productivity to your fingerprints! This app for macOS boosts your efficiency by helping you search your computer and web with great speed.
You can use Alfred for multiple things. It allows you to open things, search for things, define and time them, easily calculate things and expand tests, contact people and manage clipboard and so much more. Definitely give Alfred a try and experience its possibilities.
Price: Free
Have you ever forgotten your password? Now you really forget your passwords as 1Password will remember all of them for you. Using 1Password is super simple: just save your passwords and login to websites with a single click.
Besides, if you often have a hard time thinking of new and unique passwords – worry no more. 1Passwords has your back and it will create a strong password instead of you and sync between your devices.
Price: $2.99 monthly
Have you ever wanted to organize the apps on menu bar? Now you can!
With Bartender 2 you can easily rearrange apps on your menu bar, hide them and even move to separate Bartender Bar. Give it a try and find out multiple variations of your menu bar.
Price: $15
This small productivity app allows you to safely uninstall unwanted apps from your computer. As you know any time you install an application dozens of files are distributed throughout your System. Besides taking up much space, they leave traces which are hard to find with custom tools.
That’s why you need AppCleaner to clean up the mess and delete all traces of unwanted apps from your device.
Price: Free
You definitely have a lot of things, right? Add one more “thing” to your list – Things app. This is a small and easy-to-use task manager which makes you truly productive.
If you’re tired of all big apps with dozens of features (most of which you don’t need), then Things is your choice. Give it a try!
Price: $49.99
Don’t believe people who say that you don’t need a anti-malware program on your Mac. While, there might not be a need for heavy-weight and cumbersome applications, Malware Bytes is all you need.
Malwarebytes Anti-Malware scans your computer, finds and removes code that lowers system performance or destroys your system. If your Mac is running slow and annoying adware and pop-ups keep coming, definitely install this app and revive your Mac.
Price: Free
Sometimes you can’t find the exact file you need, but often times it turns out you have multiples of the same file. Finding and removing every duplicate file seems like a redundant task. That’s what Gemini is for!
Forget about the problem of duplicate files with Gemini. It spots duplicates and similar files, sees how they’re different and deletes the ones you don’t need. Gemini is smart and it learns all the time to improve the process. Sounds amazing, right? Get yourself mac productivity apps like Gemini and free up tons of space on your Mac.
Price: Free
This app is one of those mac productivity apps that will help you keep in track of and visualize your team’s email activity. It is private and secure and will let you to monitor and measure the email productivity of your team and other employees.
Email Analytics provides an opportunity to segment the teams which you need to monitor, and compare their analytics data to rule out the top performing members. You can see the analytics in real-time and the reports are updated frequently to ensure you get the most precise results.
This is great for boosting your and your team’s productivity in the long run, so give it a try on your Mac. There’s a 14 day trial after which you will have to pay $15 per mailbox a month.
By now you should already have your Mac ready to took off and allow you to be your most productive self. Let us know in the comments which Mac app is your favorite!