How do you improve and mark productivity during your remote collaboration with nearshore development services — and in general? These 12 best productivity apps for Mac, iPhone, iOS, Android, or other platforms will help you keep track of your progress, save you time, and help you stay focused.
The Best Productivity Apps You Must Use
Asana
Asana, a project management tool, allows you to create projects, assign tasks to yourself or the software development team members, and establish goals. In addition, you have the option to create sections — such as “pending review” or “to be edited” — and move tasks into the appropriate spot. You’ll also receive notifications, including messages about newly-assigned tasks and project updates. This productivity app is an ideal tool for collaboration and software outsourcing because you’ll be able to keep track of the work the outside organization or developers have done and your project’s status.
Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the best productivity apps for storing and sharing your projects. Its chief attribute is accessibility. It allows you to view your files anywhere and sync your projects across your various devices. You can also share your data with others who have Dropbox. So if, for example, your development team has files that they want you to review, they only need to upload them to Dropbox, and you can download them and take a look.
Google Keep
Google Keep is the perfect productivity app for taking and collating notes. Essentially, it allows you to create digital sticky notes, but you can sync them across multiple devices, including your mobile phone, laptop, and tablet. The notes come in standard Post-It note colors for visual appeal and organization. You can store your notes in a sidebar in Google Docs and add them to your documents. If you want to give notes on your latest project or add items to a meeting agenda with your development team, you can easily share your notes and have team members add their suggestions to them.
ProofHub
Project management and collaboration tool, ProofHub, allows teams to create projects, add task lists, assign tasks, communicate and collaborate, track progress, share files and provide feedback from anywhere with just an internet connection. ProofHub can streamline the work of all kinds of teams, be it design, development, testing, marketing teams, etc. It makes work easier, and team members get a single source of truth that keeps the entire team on the same page and helps them collaborate in real-time. In addition, team members do not need to juggle various apps or fall into the email web to communicate, collaborate or share information.
Managers can clearly lay all the tasks on a digital kanban board with task descriptions or deadlines defined. This app makes everyone clear on who is responsible for what. Whenever a task is completed, team members can change its stage on the Kanban board, and everyone gets notified. This way, proper transparency is maintained in the workflow, and the next person concerned with that task can take action. Team members can directly attach task files on the Kanban board and access concerned team members and clients for proofreading and review purposes. This way, productivity gets a boost as one of the best productivity apps serves all these purposes, and there remains no need to ask for updates in email or share files via mails. Team members can quickly come together to discuss important matters or brainstorm on topics. ProofHub has a simple interface, and it involves almost zero learning curve. All teams can quickly adapt to their functionality. The visibility and transparency that ProofHub provides to the entire project workflow eliminate the scope of confusion so that work gets done efficiently within the given time and in an accountable manner.
Monday.com
The best productivity app for managing your projects, Monday.com visually lays out the tasks your team needs to accomplish. In addition, you’ll be able to add tasks within the project components and update the status. So, if you’re using software outsourcing to create a particular product, you can view status updates in real-time and see whether the developers are meeting benchmarks. You can also store files within the productivity app to enable anyone with access to review them quickly.
Fyle
Fyle is an expense management software that seamlessly automates your entire pre-accounting process end-to-end. It lets employees submit and track their business expenses from applications they use every day like G-Suite, Slack, Outlook, etc. In addition, it automatically checks each submitted expense against company policy, so Finance teams don’t have to verify each one of them manually. Automated compliance ensures that preventing expense fraud does not fall on the shoulders of your Finance teams alone. By freeing up their time, they can use the advanced insights like department/project-wise spending, top policy violators, or frequently used airline or hotel chains provided on Fyle’s dashboard to make smart decisions for the months ahead. This can ensure that your financial bottom line is unaffected and can sustain you through the uncertain times of the pandemic.
MindMeister
Brainstorming is made simple with MindMeister, a productivity app for developing and sharing thoughts. It offers a canvas for you and your colleagues to visually depict ideas and link related ones together to create a map centering around your original concept. The app’s layout is customizable, with plenty of icons, shapes, colors, and fonts to choose from.
Slack
In the case of software outsourcing — or outsourcing any work or project — Slack, an app for sending messages and attachments to people and groups, is a must. It facilitates quick and smooth communication without sending a jumble of texts and emails to team members. Instead, channels enable you to communicate with selected user groups and discuss different projects or topics. Team members can enter or leave different channels, and all your conversations are searchable if you need to go back and reference a subject.
Todoist
Wondering how productive you’ve been? Todoist will let you know. With this efficiency-measuring app, you’ll “check off” tasks as you complete them and receive a score rating for your productivity daily and weekly. You can also view the tasks you need to accomplish in a given period and organize them by priorities. In addition, the app will automatically categorize the tasks you enter based on your hashtags and send you reminders of appointments and more. Loop your development services into what needs to be accomplished as well — the productivity app allows you to map out projects and keep track of responsibilities and deadlines.
Toggl
If you’re wondering how you spend your time in a day, Toggl is an app that measures it for you. Based on your defined categories, Toggl lets you set timers as you embark on various tasks and will give you detailed reports showing how you’ve broken up your time. So don’t worry if you forget to set the timer — Toggl will remind you to. This is a great way for software outsourcing to determine how the team manages your project.
Trello
Trello is an essential project management tool. Through digital cards, you, your software development team, and in-house employees can manage tasks, add descriptions of what needs to be accomplished, set due dates, and share files. You can assign cards to the person or people responsible for the task, and they’ll receive reminders of upcoming deadlines. Different columns allow you to move the cards based on the project status or other specifications. This system makes projects more manageable by breaking them up into bite-sized chunks.
Zapier
This productivity app connects and syncs all other apps, streamlining your activities. In addition, Zapier can integrate more than 1,000 productivity tools into a single platform, such as Dropbox, Google calendar, Slack, Trello, and many others. As a result, many tedious and rote tasks, such as sending out alerts for the same weekly tasks, become automated, saving you time and energy. Productivity apps can be helpful for individuals, but when you’re collaborating with a nearshore development team or outsourcing projects in general, they’re practically essential. These apps will help you communicate, share important information, set and keep track of deadlines, receive updates, and generally make everyone’s lives much more manageable.
