There are just so many distractions on smartphones these days that people have forgotten the core reason they were developed in the first place – to make your life easy and productive. Yet there are more apps to play games, listen to music and chat with friends, even strangers! But also there are numerous apps to help you improve your work life if used with an element of consistency and diligence. Check out some of them.

1. Any.do

Any do is a task manager for your smartphone that is unlike any other you may have come across. You can make To-Do lists and tag them with geo-locations to be notified at the right place and time. Features such as sharing tasks and lists plus sync across multiple devices are only a handful of the whole lot. A must for those who want to keep work as well as personal life organized.

2. HabitRPG

HabitRPG is an app that helps users to develop any positive habits and manage their time by turning their life into an RPG game. A player wins rewards like gold coins by completing real life goals or daily tasks. You can even see how your friends are doing and compete with them to further improve efficiency. Although it is still in the development phase and the user interface can be a bit slow, it sure is an awesome way to keep a tab on yourself.

3. Anti-Social

With a lot of work on your table, you might not afford to log in to social networks, but yet somehow you end up on that Facebook page time and again. Anti-social, a web application, is here to help. With this you can block any distracting websites that interfere while you work. You can also ‘Time-Block’ websites for as ling as 8 hours. Available for both Windows and Mac .

4. Rescue Time

Rescue Time helps you to track down your day to day activities on your computer and mobile, telling you about the amount of time you spend on each website or app or even on voice calls. This acts as an awesome way to eliminate bad habits. It has features like efficiency score and top distractions which give you even more details on your Internet usage. The premium version of the app offers even more features like reporting and blocking websites to be distraction free, alerts when you surpass your target time and unlimited usage history.

5. IFTTT

Working on the simple principle of “If This, Then That”, IFTTT is an app that let’s to set up automation tasks for other web services or apps like google drive, instagram, gmail etc. These services are hooked in a way that makes them react to trigger events. For example, a tweet on twitter by you will trigger the app to post the same on facebook. Or if someone tags you in a photo on any social media, it will get automatically saved to your cloud service. All this and much more will be based on the preferences or trigger events you set. A must app to automate recurring tasks.

6. HootSuite

HootSuite is an all in one social media account manager. It has support for all major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. This is best suited for businesses which add profits through social network activities. You can schedule messages and posts to be published on any time of the day or even share photos to all platforms at once. Best features include managing ad campaigns and viewing analytic data on the number of clicks posts receive. Quite handy when while building a business brand on the Internet.

7. DropBox

Although insanely famous, Dropbox certainly deserves a mention on the list. It is a free cloud service that lets you save images, videos or any kind of documents in your account on the site. These files can then be accessed from anywhere and can even be automatically saved on other computers or smartphones. Moreover all email attachments can also be set to be saved directly to Dropbox. With tons of features and extensions, Dropbox’s rise to fame has been swift.

Conclusion

All these apps or services strive to solve general user problems and speed up their work. Please note that such productivity apps need some time and constant use to reflect the promise to improve your work life. So with some patience and energy you will surely notice the differences. If you think I missed out on any of your favorite app, please share through the comments section.