Your iPhone and iPad are not only great for keeping up with the latest news from friends and world events, taking incredible photographs, playing games, and generally keeping yourself entertained, but they are also little powerhouses that can organise your life while allowing you to get some work done. To make this happen you’ll need the right apps, so here’s our selection of the ten best ones for productivity and organisation.
If you’re looking for tablet-specific tools, then be sure to also read How to use your iPad for work.
Apple iOS and iPadOS apps
Before heading off to the app store to download productivity apps, it’s worth spending some time with those that Apple already includes on your device. Notes has seen some upgrades in recent years, allowing you to create entries with tables, lists, freehand drawing, text, scanned documents or photographs. These can then be stored in dedicated folders so you can organise your notes effectively.
Reminders is also a useful tool for setting alarms, having a daily list of your tasks, and even setting up shopping lists. Any of these can be location based, meaning your iPad or iPhone will remind you of them when you get to work, home or to the local greengrocers. There’s also the handy option of your device alerting you of that pressing issue you meant to mention when you’re exchanging messages with specific people.
Of course, no organisational line-up would be complete without some kind of scheduling tool and Apple Calendar is a simple but effective option. It allows colour-coding of particular calendars, can add location data to appointments, and works across all your Apple devices.
Evernote
If you’re looking to up your note-taking game, Evernote is still the best place to start. You can record your thoughts in a variety of different formats (including images), sync them across your devices, share them, and search within them to quickly find what you’re looking for. The big benefit Evernote has over the competition is that it integrates with a whole host of other apps and services, helping it fit play nicely with the rest of your workflow.
There are some restriction on the Basic (Free) tier, such as a monthly upload limit of 60MB, a maximum note size of 25MB, syncing only two devices, plus access to content offline available solely on the desktop version.
So, if this is too strict for your needs then you’ll want to upgrade to the Premium plan which alongside a 10GB monthly upload limit, a 200MB maximum file size, and unlimited synced devices, also adds features like searching and annotating PDFs, linking with Google Drive files, as well as being able to forward email to your Evernote account, all for £4.99/$7.99p/m.
Spendee
As the name might suggest, Spendee is a budgeting app that can help you manage your personal finances. All of your spending habits are displayed in a selection of attractive graphs and charts, and it can handle multiple currencies for when you travel abroad too. Everything is then synced across devices, including a browser version and an Apple Watch app.
The free tier allows you to create a single budget and cash wallet, but doesn’t have a bank sync feature. For this you’ll need to move to either the Spendee Premium plan that costs £2.79/$2.99 a month, then you can also create and manage multiple wallets and budgets, including shared ones – in case you have communal spending with your family or flatmates.
Todoist
There are plenty of to-do list apps out there (with a couple more in this list), but Todoist is one of the classics and it’s still got plenty going for it. The app is available across more than 10 different platforms, so you can track what you need to get done on just about every device you own, online and offline.
Tasks can be broken down into sub-tasks, shared with other users for collaborative progress, colour-coded for different priority levels, and set to recur, while paid add-ons include attachments, reminders, labels, and filters. Throw in the attractive, minimalist design, and it’s easy to see why Todoist has stuck around for so long.
Basic tier is free, allowing you to create up to 80 projects and share them with up to 5 people, or there’s the Premium tier for £3/$3 p/m (billed annually) which increases both allowances while also introducing reminders, comments, file uploads, labels, filters, and trends.
Google Docs
OK, sure, we’re not exactly pushing the boat out by recommending Google Docs here, but there’s good reason for that. For one thing, Google’s online Office equivalents are among the most fully-featured out there, and for the most part you can happily shift all of your writing, spreadsheets, and presentations onto the system without losing any functionality.
But the other big advantage is Google itself. It means Docs is fully integrated into the rest of the Google ecosystem, ideal if you already use Gmail or any other Google platforms. It also means there’s a good chance you already have Docs in your office, and that a lot of the other productivity apps on this list will integrate with Docs, which should help to keep your life a bit more streamlined – which is probably the reason you’re here.
Forest
In the straightforward sense, Forest doesn’t really do anything. It doesn’t let you take notes, plan your calendar, share documents, or anything like that. But it could, in theory, help you get better at doing all of those things.
The idea is pretty simple. If you want to get on with some task, you plant a tree within the app. If you can stay in Forest for a set period of time, the tree will grow. If you get distracted and open Facebook, it will wither and die. The more successfully you work and resist distractions, the bigger your virtual forest. Sure, it’s a bit silly, but we’ve heard of worse ways to keep yourself motivated and £1.99/$1.99 is a price worth paying.
Streaks
Streaks is another app that doesn’t directly let you do anything that you couldn’t do before, but should help you form the habits you need to just be a bit more productive in general. You choose up to twelve tasks that you want to be regular habits. Complete one, and you extend your streak. Fail to and it resets. It’s that simple.
Tasks are set to daily by default, but can instead be weekdays-only or three days a week, or whatever else you can come up with. It also syncs with the iOS Health app to track your steps, heart rate, and more for specific goals. Oh, and it works on the Mac and Apple Watch too, to make things even easier. So, invest £4.99/$4.99 and start on on your new set of streaks which hopefully will help establish productive habits.
IFTTT
Forgive the unpronounceable name. It stands for ‘If This, Then That’, and it allows users to create ‘applets’ combining the actions of a variety of apps under certain conditions.
You could set your music to start playing when you get home, track your work hours with Google Calendar or any number of other combinations. IFTTT claims to work with over 360 apps, including Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, plus the developers regularly expand its selection of triggers and actions so it can automate even more of your life. Best of all, it’s free.
Shoeboxed
There are few elements of modern life more tedious than filing expenses. Thankfully, there’s an app for that. Shoeboxed is pretty simple: it uses your iPhone camera to scan receipts and store digital copies of them, allowing you to get rid of all those crumpled bits of fading paper cluttering up your ‘miscellaneous stuff’ drawer.
The app can use your GPS to track mileage, and receipts are actually scanned and turned into text, rather than just left as photos, for easy use in other software and apps, and it’ll import email receipts from Gmail too. You can even have them printed out and sent in a ‘magic envelope’ to anyone who insists on receiving physical copies.
There are various paid tiers, with the Starter package costing £3.99/$4.99 p/m for 25 document scans a month, but the 30-day free trial gives you the chance to test out whether Shoeboxed is for you before adding another receipt to your collection.
Habitica
Habitica is another motivational, habit-forming app – but with a pretty crucial difference. The whole app is 16-bit RPG themed, turning chores and tasks into quests and hopefully making everyday life just a little more epic.
You can set real-world rewards (like getting to watch TV or eat a treat), level up, unlock new gear, and even team up with other people to defeat monsters by generally all being a little more productive in your day-to-day lives. Admittedly, if you don’t know your Final Fantasy from your Chrono Trigger you might not get as much out of it, but for those of us weaned on epic RPGs, it’s a great way to make flossing your teeth every night feel a little less mundane.
A subscription costs either £4.99/$4.99 p/m, £14.49/$14.99 for three months, £28.49/$29.99 for six months or £45.99/$47.99 for a full year.
1Password
Passwords are, frankly, bloody annoying. A necessary evil of the modern world, we’re all stuck either using one password everywhere, with all the obvious security risks that involves, or using different ones on every site and inevitably forgetting them every time we actually need to use them.
1Password is intended to slice through this particularly modern Gordian knot. It stores passwords for hundreds of websites and apps behind one secure Master Password – or a pin or fingerprint on your iPhone, if you prefer. It’s free for the first 30 days, but costs £3.49/$2.99p/m (billed annually) if you decide you’d like to keep using it beyond that. If you have children or siblings then you should consider the Family package which gives you five accounts for £6.49/$4.99 p/m again when you pay for the year in advance.
To see how it compares to other services, read our Best password managers for iPhone guide.
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Via MACWORLD