Three Productivity Apps I’m Learning to Love

My husband is a productivity geek. I’m afraid he’s rubbing off on me.

At work, we use Outlook and it’s a solid tool. But I like a barrier between home and work tasks, so I’ve been on a quest to find resources I can use for household, personal, and community-based projects.

Here are three I’m learning to love:

1. LIFT: Lift is the perfect app if you’re trying to forge new habits (or let go of oldies). Whether you choose to monitor your progress privately or join a community of friends and strangers (who are there to support you and hold you accountable), Lift invites you to create and track new habits on the path to productivity and change. It’s also simply and elegantly designed, so it’s always a pleasure to use. 

What are some of the habits I’m trying to create?

• Eat veggies at breakfast every day.
• Do a two-minute “mind-sweep” every day.
• Spend 10 minutes each day organizing something in my home or office.
• Offer an act of kindness, randomly, every day.

 

The Lift interface (l–r): Today’s Habits, Habit History, Activity Details, and Community Support

2. ANY.DO: I love a good to-do list, and paper and pen just don’t cut it for me anymore (I have too many lists in too many different places and, invariably, my three-year old colors all over them or I drench them in spilled tea). Any.do to the rescue. With a clean, logical, and intuitive mobile interface, Any.do also interfaces with Google Chrome, so you can seamlessly turn email into action items. Create action items for today, tomorrow, those coming up soon, and the ever desirable someday. And the best part about Any.do? Once you check off some of your to-do items, you can shake your phone to clear them out, and it playfully celebrates with notes (when sound is off) or out loud (with a voice far more loving than Siri).

(on left, Cal; on right, Any.do)

3. CAL: Cal is a sister app for Any.do. Not only does Cal automatically integrate your to-do items into your daily calendar, it will grab birthdays, anniversaries, and events from Facebook; you can schedule events and email invites (with location maps and details!) to anyone (in or beyond your address book); you can add notes and reminders for those events; and, if you share Google calendars with friends or family members, Cal automatically migrates those appointments and events into the app, too. Sometimes, I open it just to look at it—it’s so stinking pretty.