We spend more than one-third of our waking hours working. As human beings,  we strive to produce more and better ourselves every day.

And we are in a never-ending circle of brainstorming new ways or planning for better results. Even trying to discover new methods and frameworks to help make ourselves more productive. Doing this could help our work bee more effective.

If it not managed well it can result in negative effects on our productivity and health. Some cases, we can get burned out, which can lead to a loss of confidence and ambition.

So to make our lives easier we should take to our full advantage in using apps that can help us to plan projects, doing the day to day tasks such as getting the groceries. To ideating magnanimous project planning on an enterprise level.

Still, at times balancing between multiple apps can get overwhelming. After all, technology is assumed to make life easier.

There’s plenty of productivity apps which are both free and paid, around the internet, and still, it can be difficult to make a choice.

So, I’ve made a list of 15 productivity apps that can give you more value for your time. These apps also can help you achieve and retain your productivity by helping you streamline your routine and keeping your progress inline.

1. IFTTT

IFTTT helps you save time by automating the tasks that you always do on the internet, such as messaging friends, backing up your media files to your cloud account. It has pre-built applets that will do all your most common tasks but you can also customise your own in case you want to add more on the list.

Price: Free

2. Buffer

What makes Buffer stand-out from other automation tools for social media is that its simple and straight to the point. It does not give you a lot of choices which most of the time complicate things, but more than it can help you. Automate all your social media posts using Buffer through your desktop or mobile.

Price: Free to plans starting at $15.00 per month which is billed monthly.

3. Bear

Bear Notes is a note taking app designed for iOS and Mac users. What makes the app stand out from those other apps is the simplicity of its user interface complimented by its text formatting features.

Price: $1.49 monthly, which offers a one week free trial or $14.99 annually, which has a one month free trial

4. Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace where you can write, plan, collaborate and get organised, it allows you to take notes, add tasks, manage projects & more. It works across all platforms including on Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, Web.

It provides the building blocks and you can create your own layouts and toolkit to get work done. This workspace allows you to write in a beautiful clean space, build your own personal wiki with endless layers of content, plan using a kanban view, a calendar or a simple list view or to capture your workflows and record everything creating spreadsheets and databases.

Price: Free to $8.00 per member per month

5. SaneBox

SaneBox is an email management app that works well with any email. Some of the features include SaneNews which groups all your newsletters and magazines in one place. SaneBlackHole which trains your mailing lists which emails need to go to the trash and SaneNoReplies which shows if your email has been opened by the recipient or not.

Price: From 16¢/day

6. Asana

Asana is a web and mobile app which puts your teams communication and project management in one place. This tools allows you to assign tasks to each team member, set the deadline and communicate with each other thus eliminating long and messy email threads where some important communication can get lost somewhere along the way.

Price: Free to $ 24.99 Per User, per month billed annually

7. Plan

Plan is a calendar and task management app for your desktop. It helps you organise your tasks and events making sure you don’t forget any important meetings or left any task unfinished.

Price: Free to $6.67 Per User, per month

8. Spark

Spark is an award-winning app for your email(s). It understands which of your emails are the most important and pops them on the top of the list. There are three categories your email are divided into Personal, Newsletters, and Notifications. And its available on Mac and iOS.

Price: Free to $6.39 Per active user, per month billed annually

9. Any.do

Any.do keeps your schedule on track with to-do lists, calendars, notes and other collaborative tools that allow you to share lists and tasks with others. There’s also a voice integration feature that allows you to add to your lists through voice command.

Also it syncs with all your devices so you can keep track of everything through your mobile devices anywhere.

Price: Free or Premium plan $5.99 per month (billed annually)

10. Just Press Record

Just Press Record is an iOS app that works it even works on the Apple Smartwatch. You can record your voice just by one-tap using the app icon from a notification or lock screen widget.

Just Press Record can turn speech to text and transcribe what you are saying including spoken punctuation marks. The app supports a number of languages and syncs to iCloud so you can share your recordings and transcriptions easily.

Price: $4.99

11. Fantastical

Fantastical is a calendar app for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch that is packed with powerful features for creating and managing schedules and events.

Use the daily, weekly, or monthly calendar to create your events either by typing them using the menu-based interface. Fantastical has added a map to its feature so you will know where the event will take place and how long for you to get there from your location.

Price: $3.33 per month Billed yearly

12. Dropbox

Use Dropbox to store all your media files and access them anytime and anywhere as long as you’re connected to the Internet.

Price: Free to $20.00 per user per month

13. Harvest

Harvest is a browser extension that gives you an honest report on what things are eating up your time and how much you’ve spent on each of them.

This way it will help you become aware of what things are distracting you and thus, need to be cut-off or watch yourself from. It can also help you strategise your time better so you can utilise every single minute you have each day. Also Harvest is a must-have as its syncs up with other productivity tools such as Asana.

Price: Free to $12.00 per person per month

14. Trello

Trello, it is one of the preferred digital bulletin boards used by teams. This highly customisable interface allows you to create different kinds of lists from tasks to pictures. Aside from placing items under categories, you can also tag them as “doing” or “done” making it easier to keep track of projects.

Price: Free to $9.99 per user per month

15. Panda

Panda is your go-to resource for any designer wanting to keep up with the latest inspiration, news and industry insights. This tool allows you to browse over 100 websites all in one place, so you can sit back, relax and enjoy your morning cuppa.

Price: Free