Many of us have hit a summer slump and are looking for ways to increase our productivity. Here are some of the best apps available for iOS and Android to help you increase productivity:
1. Contactually:
Contactually is the best way to build and improve the most important relationships in your network. Smarter tools for staying in touch with the people who matter most. So why not have Contactually connected to the most important communications device you own — your phone?
2. Evernote:
Evernote is a closed source freemium suite of software and services, designed for notetaking and archiving. A "note" can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten "ink" note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched, and exported as part of a notebook.
Evernote supports a number of operating system platforms (including OS X, iOS, Chrome OS, Android, Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and webOS) and also offers online synchronisation and backup services.
Evernote is available in a paid version or a more restricted free version. Use of the online service is free up to a certain monthly usage limit, with additional monthly use reserved for Plus subscribers, and unlimited monthly use for Premium costumers.
3. Refresh:
If you have your calendar on your phone or online on iCloud, Gmail, Google apps, Yahoo Exchange, it can do proactive searches on the people you've scheduled meetings with and send you information ahead of time to help you prepare for your meeting or event. Its people detection algorithms can determine (or intelligently guess) who you are meeting, even from first names. You can correct it or tell it to ignore someone you already know well, and it does learn from repetition. However, If you do not have an online or iOS calendar (or don't keep it up), you lose a lot of the advantage, although you can still look people up by name.
You can also make your own notes on the person, including things you promised to do, common events or shared interests. The app’s developers recently added maps and photos as well, which is nice when you're wondering if a town is close to something you know. You can also find information on companies.
4. Sunrise:
Sunrise offers an enormous number of features: agenda view, week view, and month view, Google Maps previews for maps and directions, contact photos, weather, and tasteful Facebook events and birthdays integration. There's also an agenda widget for your home screen that lets you check your schedule at a glance or quickly add an event. The app syncs effortlessly with Google Calendar, and even uses Google to auto-fill locations for your events as you type them in.
5. Anasa:
Anasa is a web and mobile application designed to enable teamwork without email. It was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook. Asana is web based software-as-a-service for the designed to improve collaboration of teams. Main user focus is to plan and manage projects and tasks online without the use of email providing each team a workspace. Workspaces contain projects, and projects contain tasks.
In each task, users can add notes, comments, attachments, and tags. Users can follow projects and tasks, and, when the state of a project or task changes, followers get updates about the changes in their inboxes.
