Do you sometimes feel your smart devices are a drain on your productivity? We get that, but it doesn’t have to be that way! Getting beyond media consumption and using your iPad or iPhone to stay focused and on track might take a little foresight and planning, but productivity apps have the potential to transform your device from a hindrance to help when it comes to organized productivity. Your iPad Pro, in its iPad Pro case, might just turn out to be your gateway to a well-ordered, highly productive life!
Here are our favorite productivity apps for 2022— from simple apps like a Pomodoro timer to complex apps that have the potential to order your whole life— if you let them. Let’s get started.
If This Then That
Too many things to keep track of— and too many on-the-spur decisions to make— can definitely be a drain on your productivity and sap your decision-making vigor. If This Then That (ITTT) allows you to connect apps by making your decisions ahead of time and automating your device. Want a reminder to bring in the plants before a frost, or would you like to blink your porch lights in a mad SOS when the international space station goes overhead? Set it up with this handy app, which can connect with your smart home devices and any other apps you choose.
Just Press Record
At first glance, just press record looks like a basic recording app, no snazzier than Apple’s default voice memos. That’s not the whole picture, though! This app can transcribe the speech it records, and both recordings and the accompanied (searchable) transcriptions get synced to iCloud. You can also share yours. recordings directly to a number of different apps.
Be Focused Pro
Be Focused Pro is a clean, professional Pomodoro timer and productivity tracker that works on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and even on your Apple watch, syncing between whatever devices you use it on. A favorite among many productivity gurus, the app allows you to customize the way you do Pomodoro: you can set your work and break intervals the way they work best for you, and can even customize the number of short breaks before a long break.
Be Focused Pro takes good records, and you can export data to a CSV file. You can also generate reports, either for a client (think freelance work) or for personal records.
Todoist
Need a to-do list with color-coded priority levels and productivity graphs? Todoist may be what you’re looking for. This app works well as a basic to-do list, but there are plenty of more advanced features to please more advanced users, including integration with Dropbox, If This Then That, and Slack. One of our favorite features is their natural language processing, an AI-based neural network that can convert a quickly jotted down thought into a task.
Trello
It’s a digital bulletin board, but one well-optimized for modern productivity. Make lists, fill them with cards, then do what you want with them! Often used in a work setting, for task assignation and tracking, Trello is also well suited as a personal productivity app. It allows you to organize your thoughts and keep track of what needs to be done when without going to the trouble of setting reminders or making an official to-do list.
Google Drive
Back before Dropbox, back before Google Drive, people carried around a USB stick with key files and dealt with virus dangers whenever you plugged it into another computer. Today, we use productivity apps like Drive, which allow us to sync our hard drives to the cloud and access them anywhere. Google gives a limited amount of free storage; if you want to go above that, you’ll need to pay (or make yourself a new account). The beauty of this solution, though, is the way it lends itself so well to file sharing and collaboration—- and we do appreciate the way we can easily access any of our important files on our iPad, anytime, no matter where we are or where the file was originally created.
Evernote
A cross-platform note-taking app, Evernote is easy to understand for the casual user but has plenty of extra functionality for those who want to dig deeper. It’s a place you can store bits of information when you’re browsing the web, or write up more comprehensive notes when you have a bit of downtime. You end up with notebooks in the cloud; notebooks that are accessible over all your devices.
As an unpaid account, you’ll be able to upload up to 60 MB of content monthly. If you’re just writing, that will be no issue, but you might need more space soon if you get into audio and video notes—or even pictures.
Notion
The notion is the note-taking app for teams, so if you want something even more collaborative than EverNote, this may be ideal for you. Think of a wiki, where everyone can contribute to a knowledge base— but without any of the quirks and annoyances wikis usually come with. This app does have a bit of a learning curve, but once you figure it all out you’ll impressed with its functionality.
Cloud Battery
Have you ever taken your iPad with you in hopes of an especially productive commute— only to find, when out on the go, that your device was all out of battery? If you’ve got multiple devices, it can be hard to keep track of the battery levels on all of them— and that’s where the cloud battery app comes in. It gives you a summary of all the battery levels on all your devices, and you can set it up to get alerts when the battery level on any device goes below a certain level. Which app gives you the biggest boost to productivity? We’d love to learn about it.