Do your team members find it difficult to manage their time effectively and coordinate their schedules efficiently? If you and your coworkers are human, then the answer to this question is probably a definitive “yes.”
Fortunately, employing a few well-designed team productivity apps can help you bring out the best in your employees and secure your reputation as a team managing superstar!
Freedom
What would you give for another 2 hours of productivity each day? Freedom is the app that will help you kick the habit of mindlessly wandering towards sneaky digital distractions during what should be your most productive working hours. Freedom is designed to help you fight against all those other apps and sites that are built to keep you unproductively scrolling through endless content throughout the day. Help your team break those detrimental habits and become more present for all the important work they do.
Freedom users can block any offending sites and apps across all of your devices. You can start a distraction-free work session anytime, as well as schedule times when you can and can’t access your favourite social networks, games, or anything else online that’s sabotaging your attention span during the work day.
Companies like Apple, Google, and Harvard use Freedom to help their employees take back control of their time. Freedom could help you gain a reported average of 2.5 hours of productivity everyday. Not only does Freedom help improve your focus at work, this personal productivity app can also help you build a healthier balance between the time you spend on and offline. Try using Freedom to schedule a break from all of your apps an hour before bed, so you can wind down and wake up fully refreshed and ready to be productive in the morning.
Textexpander
Textexpander let’s you access and autotype any text snippet you need to get a job done. That might sound basic, but using Textexpander is more accurate and much faster than manually re-typing the same things over and over again, or simply relying on copy and paste. Textexpander lets you build a library of anything you’d ever need to add to your writing more than once:
- Signatures
- Pieces of code
- Images
- Writing templates
- Form letters
- Frequently used phrases or messages
- Anything else your productive imagination will think to automate
Use Textexpander’s keyboard shortcuts or create your own custom abbreviations to access everything you need to get your writing ready to publish or send in less time. Sync your snippet library to all of your devices and share relevant pieces with your team so everyone’s always on the same page. Whether you’re answering a customer’s question, adding a legal disclaimer to an important document, or taking the most efficient possible notes in a meeting, Textexpander could easily become your most frequently used team productivity app.
Calendar
Calendar can connect your Outlook, Google and Apple calendars, and it adds productivity-boosting functionality that your team will appreciate. This app streamlines your team’s ability to schedule in person and remote meetings with clients and coworkers. All you need to do is add your availability and meeting details so anyone can schedule a meeting with you. Calendar will handle keeping all participants in the loop, account for time zone differences, and make sure you’re never double-booked.
Built-in artificial intelligence and machine learning will run in the background to offer a user experience that’s tailored to your scheduling and team collaboration needs. You don’t have to work for a tech startup to take advantage of cutting edge productivity hacks. Calendar offers analytics tools so you can track how much time you spend in different types of meetings and how often you meet with different contacts. You can also access a paid feature that creates automated transcripts for all your meetings.
Calendar’s developers are always working on new features – including giving managers the ability to track their team’s productivity based on time management and meetings analytics.
Fantastical
Fantastical is one of the most popular productivity apps for Apple product users, syncing across all your devices from your MacBook to your Apple Watch. Fantastical can be used with all of the top calendar apps you already love—like Google, Outlook, Office 365, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Exchange. Fantastical offers a huge variety of paid and premium features:
- Upload files and images directly to anything you schedule so you can access everything you need across devices.
- Check your team member’s availability and propose meeting times that can be automatically scheduled based on your invitees responses.
- Create templates based on frequently scheduled tasks so you can schedule new ones more efficiently.
- Use “Calendar Sets” to categorize, switch between, and focus on specific types of tasks in your schedule.
- Get notifications when something’s due, and Fantastical will automatically push overdue items up on your calendar so that nothing slips through the cracks.
- Access calendars from a database that includes sports and TV schedules, as well as regional, religious and school system holidays.
Fantastical subscribers have the tools to lead the pack with a new level of focus. Instantly crosscheck the locations of your plans with a real-time 10 day weather forecast provided by AccuWeather. If you work with people who live in different parts of the world, Fantastical even offers support for scheduling meetings across all time zones and six languages.
We all have our favourite personal productivity apps, but introducing your coworkers to the right team productivity app can be a real game changer for improving the efficiency of your collaborations. When your whole team can plan, share resources, and schedule meetings seamlessly, productivity can flow in a way it can’t when everyone is struggling to simply manage their schedules. You’ve already taken the first step towards improving your productivity by reading up on these apps. We hope that sharing your research will make you look like the team collaboration genius you are!