Creative Inspiration / Apps to Work By
It’s a fact. Most of us have to work. And we consider ourselves lucky because we get to work in such an amazing industry that affects the way people live, celebrate, get healthy, start their day and treat themselves. Given that work is where we spend the majority of our time, we thought it would be great to share some of our favorite apps that make our work days easier, more productive, and yes, even more fun. And most are free – the ones that aren’t, we’ve added a handy hint.
Keeping the Money Straight
Travel, entertaining and office expenses need to be kept straight, accurate and be submitted in a timely fashion. Rely on one of these expense apps guaranteed to keep you in the black.
Concur – Part travel agent, part expense management tool, Concur makes it easy to track with the easy picture upload and a file management system. Concur also makes it easy to recall old receipts and expenses and helps with invoicing if needed as well. Available online and in app form. $
Expensify – Promising easy scanning of receipts and categorizing of travel, Expensify makes it easy to handle the money and best of all it’s free.
Get It Done
A well-managed life makes for a better workday and personal life. These apps can help from scheduling to note taking to shopping to keeping a calendar.
Evernote – An app that we can’t get enough of, Evernote can change the way your life is organized. Create notes on anything you want to track and store them in notebooks. Easily links to Basecamp, Sunrise Calendar for super simple to-do creations. If you can write it down, it belongs in Evernote. And check out Evernote Food to store recipes, restaurants, favorite meals and food pics. A must try – you’ll be addicted. (Premium option -$)
Sunrise Calendar – A beautiful calendar for desktop, iPhone, iPad and Android, Sunrise makes scheduling meetings and tracking the events in your life simple. Sunrise also links to Office 365,Basecamp, and Meetup. It even has a TV schedule calendar so you don’t miss your favorite sports, news or shows – how cool is that?
IFTTT – With a recipe-based format, IFTTT connects the apps in your life to accomplish pretty much anything you can imagine. The app offers “If” recipes and a “do” recipes with the end goal of connecting apps to make your life easier. For example, “if” you post a photo to Instagram, you can create a recipe to “then” save it to Dropbox. Maybe you want to keep a phone call log in Google Drive or log your work hours on your favorite calendar app or even make a to do list out of emails you get. If you want to do it and can imagine it, IFTTT can make it happen. The possibilities are endless.
Keeping the Team Connected
Most of us probably have a work or office based communication program. If you are still on email, here are a few great alternatives that will improve your workflow and track projects all in one place and eliminates the “I never saw that email” line.
Basecamp – For group projects, especially when personnel are located in different geographic locations, you can’t beat Basecamp. Its user interface is intuitive making it easy to upload files. Tracking projects through the use of discussions, Basecamp is the great connector to getting things accomplished. Create to-do lists, calendars, timelines – it’s a workhorse to manage your workload. $
Managing the Social Life
That is the social media life. Wouldn’t it be great to only create one post and have it go to all of your social media sites? Can do.
Buffer – Perhaps you do the tweeting for your applications group and also post the same information to LinkedIn. Buffer will make it easy to post and schedule your social media activities in all of your networks (even Pinterest) AT ONE TIME – which saves you time. And we all know what time is.
Get Started
You might already be using one or more of these apps and if you are, you know how powerful they can be. If you aren’t, take one for a spin, give it a chance and you will be amazed at your improved productivity. What will you DO with all of your extra time?
