6 Free Mobile Apps to Manage Time Effectively

Time is precious. With little time in the hand of most of us, we need all the help we can get to make the best of it, and evidently nothing do it better than mobile apps. Luckily, there are plenty of free apps, many of which are not only fun to use but also effective to adopt as productivity tools for work, study and daily life matters.

1. Google Keep

I can’t think of an app that takes notetaking to higher a level of simplicity and sophistication than Google keep. After it appeared on Google Play back in 2013, many people felt reluctant to install it as they couldn’t see it as any different from the older yet more famous apps such as evernote. Google keep, nonetheless, “kept” on improving and, along the way, adopting several cool features, some which only exists in expensive premium applications.

The current version Google keep is a far cry from the initial one. It allows you to take note instantly and sync it with Google drive, where you can access it via web version of the app. It also enables you assign colors to notes, upload images, transcribe your speech to text and even convert a text in images into an editable text.

The simplicity of Google keep makes it my favorite note taking app. Nonetheless, there are couple of feature that I would love to see Google go the extra mile for it. Instead of giving the user the option to choose the color of each note, I would find it better to auto-color code the notes so that every new note would have a different color. Of course users should have the option to disable this feature.

2. Any.Do

If you admire apps with simple layout, pretty screens, and consistant typography, Any.Do is a one that worth giving your shot. It’s hard to not fall in love with Any.Do within few minutes of using it for first time. It combines voice recognition tool, day planner, task organizer and several nice features without compromising easy-of-use.

Yet what makes this app worth conquering a space of your phone is it’s unique feature of reminding you to return a missed call. Imagine if you are in a meeting where you couldn’t answer an important call, chances are, you might forget to call back immediately after the meeting. But with Any.Do, whenever you miss a call, the app will popup an option allowing you set a time to call back.

3. Pocket

You are likely to run into interesting online content on daily basis. Be it an article, video or simply a web page. But when you don’t have the time to enjoy them, your instinct would call you to hit the bookmark button (if not saving the page to your desktop). The biggest drawback of is browser bookmarking though is that you can’t access the content offline. For that Pocket was created to allow you to save articles and view them later on both mobile or version of the app.

Pocket makes you to view the content of any article-format web page as if it’s a pdf or word. The app features convenient article listing with thumbnail images and beautiful typography. It strips down elements such as borders, background colors and other distracting elements from the saved page, helping you to focus on the text content. The app also comes with the option of adjusting the font size and viewing the web page in its original layout (desktop view).

Pocket is my list of best mobile app which have been, and still, my best companion throughout my daily commutes.

4. Remember the milk

Remember the Milk, brings together several cool features of famous to-do list apps, Most notably it allows users to sync reminders with the widely used evernote, so any a reminder in evernote will automatically make its way over to your Remember the milk account.  

The app, with the cute cow logo, have everything broken down into groups, so you can keep your work and home life separated. Its interface is simple and purpose-focused. On the top, it features ‘this week’ text which signifies the work you need to get done during the week. On the bottom, the app features two buttons labeled ‘complete’ and ‘incomplete’, that correspond the the pending or accomplished tasks.  

Remember the milk might not offer as much as google keep or Any.Do. Nonetheless, I find it a good option when the other two (for some reason) get pulled from Google play.

5. Trello

Horizontal scrolling is no fun. The developers of Trello have, nonetheless, successfully transformed what’s seems as a UX nightmare into an astounding and powerful feature, of an overall amazing project management tool.

What makes Trello unique is that it gives you the full view of the tasks you or your teams are working on . Achieving that would’ve been almost impossible without taming the horizontal scroll bar. This allowed users to scroll or swipe sideways, dragging and droping tasks from one list to another.

The way Trello is designed paves the way for endless ways of assigning or delegating tasks to teammates. The apps interface is architected based on drag and drop actions. If you love dragging and dropping things (well… who doesn’t) you might consider giving this app a shot.

6. Slack

Many argue that emails are productivity killer. You might agree with them when you open your email in the morning and see 1xx unread email from your clients with ASAP text somewhere on the tile or message content. Slack was built not just as an alternative to emails to but also as a file sharing and comprehensive project management tools.

Available as a web app, desktop app as well as mobile app, Slack makes the best of the widely used and open source webs technologies to deliver a great user experience.

Through it’s well organized interface, the app allows you to create a group for every project and invite users to participate in each group. Invited users can post messages, pictures and share files easily with each others.

I use Slack on daily basis and I find it a possible work around for productivity paradox. Meaning, you don’t have to waste time switching between several productivity tools (e.g. gmail, dropbox) just to communicate with your team and get the project going.