Great Productivity Apps for Mac Users
With a steady increase of potential interruptions, the challenge today is not to stay up-to-date, but to stay focused. How do one shut out all the disturbances? Here’s our list of our favorite productivity apps.
Noizio — Boost Productivity With Sound
If you ask people where they go when they want to be productive, few people answer “the office”. Modern offices are a constant stream of interruptions. The chattering, shouting, beeping and buzzing makes it impossible to stay focused. Any trace of productivity quickly goes away.
Noizio is a great way to shut all these noises out. The app generates a steady stream of soothing background noises that shuts out other, more intrusive sounds. Chatty colleague? Try shutting him out with some rain sound. Headphones not included.
Zonebox — Focus In Short Bursts
Us humans were not made to concentrate at one task for 8 hours a day, yet this is what our workplaces demand of us. The best way to solve this problem is by splitting up your time in small chunks of time. This is known as timeboxing. Instead of 8 hours, how about 25 minutes?
Zonebox helps you stay productive. You can add your own “boxes”, like “answer email for 15 minutes”. A friendly indicator at the top of your screen shows you how much of the time that has elapsed and serves as a reminder to stay focused. Your productivity will increase immediately.
iA Writer — Type Without The Distractions
Writing a long document? Getting increasingly bored? It happens to all of us. We often hide our inability to focus by doing things vaguely related to the writing: we change the fonts, improve the layout and adjust the margins. While it may feel like progress, the text doesn’t get any longer.
iA Writer aims to remove all the distractions. It has none of the features that you would expect from Word or Pages. It’s just the text. The interface is beautifully simple and intuitive – you just start typing. You will be surprised to see how fast you can write a long text when the distractions go away.
