Covid-19: Work From Home? Ten Must Have Apps For Better Productivity

According to a study, remote employees work 1.4 more days per month than their office-based counterparts, resulting in more than three additional weeks of work per year.

It gets very overwhelming to sit at home the whole day and work. It starts in phases. You whine about it every day in the initial stage, you get comfortable in the second one and later on you just feel numb about everything. Work from home is the new way to work and move ahead in todays time. You are amongst your family or with your friends, there is always more than one thought in your mind. How will one stay organised during this time and focus on their work?

Here is a collection of apps which can make your work from home life easy:

• Zoom: this app might be extremely controversial but if you have nothing to lose, it is quite beneficial. One can share videos, audios and share screen with it. It helps one in having meetings virtually with a large number of people. You can have about 100 people in the meeting room at a particular time. 
• Team viewer: this is one of the coolest apps which allows a second party to access your computer/laptop. This is the time for internships but unfortunately various internships are cancelled for in office mode because of the lockdown. Team viewer comes handy during these sessions. Laptops can be configured of interns via team viewer and they can start with their internships! It allows desktop sharing, online meetings, web conferencing and file transfer between devices.
• Trello: it is a good tool for keeping track of ongoing projects and the work done by members of a team. It’s a virtual reminder for sorting out to-do lists by team members with different boards for different projects where all members can track the work done, give comments and share links of work completed. Trello is available on almost all the platforms and is a total saviour for one!
• Box: This application is an alternative for Google Drive and Dropbox which allows users to save and share files securely. The app can also be integrated with Office 365, Google Apps and Slack. It helps to store files in an encrypted way and is considered to be absolutely safe when it comes to saving and transferring data.
• Noisli: While you have no choice but to be fully concentrated in an office space, at home you might not work at the required pace. In such a scenario, Noisili comes to your rescue. It is an app that produces ambient sounds to help one focus. It also drowns out noises and helps the person to concentrate better for higher productivity. 
• Asana: Asana is a project management tool that allows multiple people to work on a single project. Often people cannot work on google documents because the domain-based ids are different from personal ids. Projects get created and then assigned, while followers will be able to see any updates as they get posted. Sub-tasks can be created, attachments can be added and due dates can be set. Something like Asana is a necessity for teams, but it can also be useful for individual workflows. It’s available on every platform, and is widely supported by any software that a person uses. 

• Notion: notes can be a saviour if made properly. Don’t remember what your boss said? Check your notes! Notion is an absolutely fantastic app that is gaining popularity. This is one of the best note taking app with various other uses. It has variety of options. One can easily convert any of the text you enter into a link to another new page, a table, a list, an embedded image, or a plethora of other things. It almost feels like a full content management system, allowing you to build effectively your own Wiki or mini website in no time at all. One can also export notes as webpages or PDFs.
• Freedom: since there is no authoritative person sitting behind you, you tend to get distracted. One of the biggest challenges when it working from home is not being tempted away by Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or other online distractions. Freedom is an app that will let you block distracting apps and websites so that you can stay focussed. It’s one of the best work from home apps if you struggle with distractions and get easily distracted.
• Toggl: when you are working from home, you don’t have hardcore deadlines and a boss on your head. One often loses track of time. But Toggl is there to help you stay on track. This app helps you to manage your 9 hour shift and manage the workflow. Such tracking lets you see how you spend your time and use that data to break down your hours by projects, clients, and tasks. You can start tracking your hours in a browser, then stop it on your phone with all data synced between your phone, desktop, and web. The app features analytical time management reports, integrated calendars, suggestions on how to track activities, notifications that keep your tracking straight, and the ability to customize and organize your clients and projects.
• Spark: everyone gets spammed and its quite annoying and hectic to shuffle through all the mails in order to find the important ones. We often miss the most important emails amidst the spam ones. Taking control of email means effectively prioritizing which messages demand action now, and which can be saved for later. Spark, an email cleaner, helps you focus on important emails by sending certain messages to the top of your mailbox. You can pin and reply to important messages, and batch archive the rest. A home screen widget lets you see the number of unread emails, search, or compose a new email. This is a total lifesaver and the best one to focus on the important mails. 

Use these apps to enhance your productivity and maybe the next promotion will be yours!