Learn about the 11 best productivity apps in 2020! For the purposes of this blog post, a productivity app is any piece of software that makes your job easier and allows you to get more work done in less time. Some of the applications listed below aren't 'productivity apps' in the traditional sense of the phrase. When it comes to the best productivity app for mac users in 2020, the Todoist app is among the highest revered app available for mac devices. It is a note-taking and organized app that can keep. Mac apps can help you to become more productive. Some of the best productivity apps enable you to get more done. But you have to know what apps are the right fit for your needs and how to use them. In this tutorial, we cover the best Mac productivity apps and explain how each one can help you become more productive.
Office workers spend a jaw-dropping 1,700 hours a year in front of a computer – and that’s just in the US. A lot of that time is inherently low-value, spent managing work tools, reacting to email or browsing unproductive websites. But equally, a lot of it is just poorly managed.
From dropping work to answer a new email, to trapping 30-minute intervals between meetings – our behaviour ultimately determines the productive potential of our time. But with the help of smart technology, we can all make it go a little further.
While there are a ton tools promising to turn your productivity around, not all of them are created equal. To help cut through the noise, here’s our pic of the 11 best productivity apps for mac.
1. Dewo – for doing more deep work
Billed as your personal assistant for doing deep work, Dewo is all about creating and protecting space for the cognitively demanding work that drives you forward. Aside from breaking down your deep work across weekdays, locations and apps, Dewo can actively help you do more of it. It uses AI to trigger “Do not disturb” mode across your devices once you reach deep work, and reschedule meetings for a more focused working week. While still in beta, it offers a unique approach to solving the problems of modern knowledge work – and it’s completely free!
2. Magnet - for screen focus
Working across multiple windows or tabs makes for a cluttered rabbit warren of a workspace. Magnet solves this by helping you configure a neater arrangement, locking windows to the side of your screen wherever you drag them. It’s a great way to quickly organize your view so you can focus on what matters. Its predefined keyboard shortcuts are particularly handy when transferring text and files from one app to another.
3. Bear - for brainstorming and note-taking
![Apps Apps](/uploads/1/3/4/0/134067504/235702244.jpg)
Serving as an easy alternative to Evernote for Mac, Bear Notes organizes your thoughts intuitively. Write down your notes, and then use hashtags to “organize” your thinking. You can also use its native to-dos to stay on track with your tasks across other Apple devices. Free ruler app mac.
4. Timely - for automating time tracking
Timely automates your essential admin, so you can get back to actual productive work. It tracks everything you do on your Mac and uses AI to draft time sheets for you – solving the inaccuracy and effort of traditional manual time tracking. All your data is fed in to a private timeline, which essentially holds up a mirror to the way you work – useful for seeing how long you spend in different apps, quantifying time on tasks and identifying processes that are eating into your day. In case your work involves a lot of travel, there’s even the option to track your locations with its counterpart iOS and Android apps.
5. X.ai – for meeting scheduling
X.ai lets you cut out the painful back-and-forth of meeting scheduling. Connecting to your calendar and email, it can book meetings with anyone in your network with a single click or word. Promising to help you reach “scheduling nirvana”, it’s another no-brainer tool for automating the shallow work that eats into the time available for productive deep work.
6. Airmail - for email consolidation
“Designed with performance and intuitive interaction in mind”, Airmail dissolves the admin barriers involved with managing several accounts. It consolidates your accounts in a user-friendly format, allowing you to switch effortlessly between email accounts. As an added bonus, it also lets you quickly turn your emails into tasks and notes.
7. Alfred - for automating admin
“Used and loved by squillions of people worldwide”, Alfred fills the gap between Siri and Spotlight, automating small admin tasks and performing advanced functions. You can use the Clipboard History to find any text, file or image you copied earlier, or create your own snippets and enter a personal abbreviation to archive them. Google maps app for windows 10. Way more effective than typing it all out – essential for reducing duplicated effort!
8. Pixelmator - for free image editing
This is a terrific alternative to the cost of Photoshop, and miles better than most free image-editing apps. Draw, paint, resize, crop and add effects to your images, or customize your own effects and save them for later. While it’s not as powerful or extensive as Sketch and Photoshop, you can quickly correct images and rearrange compositional objects – making it an ideal tool for marketing and sales teams who might not need the heavyweight alternatives.
9. MindNode - for organizing thoughts
Creative people know that good ideas often spill out into other ones. Rather than trying to keep up by writing them all down as quickly as possible, why not use an app that pilots a clear run-on of your creativity? Through MindNode, you can personalize your own “mind map” and make sense of your thoughts.
10. Things - for agenda-building
Available on Mac and iOS, Things dives deeper into to-dos by creating tags, timeframes, and deadlines. Once you’ve made your morning plan, you can build your agenda and consolidate calendar events with a simple drag-and-drop. One of its newest features is Slim Mode, which allows you to collapse your sidebar to cull distractions – great if you’re working in split view.
11. Ulysses - for super-powered copywriting
Ulysses if a fully-fledged writing tool, designed to support copywriters create publication perfect text. The app quickly transforms text into beautiful PDFs, eBooks and other files, with styling and spacing intact. It also offers fun incentive-focused features, like seeing how close you are to your word count limit, alongside powerful styling features, like markup-based text editors.
Best Microsoft Productivity Apps
? See what you actually do in a day – automatically
Make your Mac invincible
Get Setapp, a toolkit with fixes for all Mac problems
Here's an app kit that will turn your academic life into a pleasant bearable experience. When you have the right tools, it's so much easier to score those A's. Get published, get a Nobel prize in math, get a favorable comment from your supervisor (in that order). You can do anything because academia is the true land of opportunity.
You can have all these apps as a part of Setapp subscription.
Best apps for students
Download Setapp and get access to handpicked apps for studying. Hack your way through college.
Manuscripts: Academic document manager
Manuscripts knows what it means to write a proper paper. Handling footnotes, annotations, references, restructuring, and editing is unbelievably easy. Everything is a click away and, unlike in Word processors, all formatting is intuitive and painless. With Manuscripts it even seems (briefly) like the style guides weren't invented to make you suffer.
Prizmo: Image to text converter
Prizmo is the best for scanning and performing OCR (Optical Character Recognition ) in 23 languages, has powerful editing capability, text-to-speech, iCloud support, and translation into 59 languages.
You can convert printed documents, photocopies of text documents, text on the images, scanned documents, and screenshots – whatever you want – into digital text. It allows to effortlessly extract and share text directly in the camera view, search for or edit your document.
Prizmo has editing tools to correct warping, skewness and other distortions. For multipage documents or multiple text documents, the software offers batch OCR functionality to speed the process.
PDFpen: Robust PDF editing
Is anyone still buying hard copies of textbooks these days? When it comes to cramming, PDF is way more convenient (weighs less at least). And with PDFpen, you also get the freedom to tweak your docs in any way imaginable – from editing text to merging multiple PDFs into one test prep package. Redaction functionality is a nice perk as well: if you’re often tempted to check solutions to exercises in your textbook, PDFpen covers them up, so that you concentrate on tasks.
![Best Productivity Apps On Mac For Academics Best Productivity Apps On Mac For Academics](/uploads/1/3/4/0/134067504/165542362.png)
MarginNote: A non-boring way to read and learn
Out of all the apps for studying and completing assignments, MarginNote is the most fun. Whenever your relationship with a textbook gets complicated, the app is there to save the day. The ultimate e-reading expert, MarginNote adapts to your study habits: you can choose your perfect annotation mode, outline and mindmap, or turn notes into flashcards. No more humdrum courses – as soon as you start using MarginNote, your study plan will be nothing short of awesome.
MathKey: Translating words into math expressions
If you’re dealing with math documents and reports, you’ll want to get your hands on MathKey. The app converts your handwriting to LaTeX, MathML, or a perfectly formatted image. Write an equation with your mouse or TrackPad and hit the Convert button – it’s that easy. You can also apply various colors to formulas and images.
Be Focused: Smart timer for productive work
Be Focused is a work timer that uses psychology to keep you on task. If know yourself to be easily distracted, this app is your jam. It's created for the ultimate work-break balance, which is essential if you want to stay sane through the semester. Set daily goals and move towards them at a steady pace, controlled by the fun interface with a classic 'pomodoro' timer.
Instant Translate: Quick translator with 100 languages
If Google's Translate kind of bums you out with its inaccuracy, try Mate (Instant Translate). It's way more powerful and can correctly translate phrases and sentences with its new feature 'Phrasebook.' It even has speech translation if you're in a hurry and typing seems tedious. 104 languages, a history of translations, and an easy access from the menu bar.
Studies: Storage for info, schedules, and memos
When you take on the next project, it all starts with notes. You probably have a pack of subject-related notes stashed somewhere on your Mac and it's a pain to find the ones you need when you need them. Studies solves this issue with elegance: it gives you separate and comfortable niches for each subject, there's a space for images and screenshots alongside text notes, and a schedule with statistics data on classes. So good.
MoneyWiz: Personal finance manager to track your expenses
You should be thinking about your next scientific breakthrough, not heating bills. Let MoneyWiz take care of money matters for you: a single setup and a single input of all your regular bills, and you'll never forget to pay anything. MoneyWiz will send you reminders, plan your monthly budget, even predict your future expenses for the nearest period (if you feel like looking into that).
Ulysses: Professional writing app
Best Productivity Apps For Windows 10
Even if your plans go as far as dissertation, Ulysses is where you should write it. This app is favored by writers and bloggers, it's distraction-free and highly reliable. It allows you to focus on writing, quickly export finished work as a PDF or an ebook, and enjoy the process way more than with the usual doc-like services.
Best Apps Mac
Aeon Timeline: Project management app
When you feel overwhelmed by the number of important items in the project, by the subtasks and milestones, open Aeon Timeline and put all of it in there. Aeon gives you a bird's-eye view of the whole project and lets you easily orient among its parts. You'll never miss anything important and your beautiful research will form easily, chapter by chapter.
Findings: Experiment and research notebook
If your academic endeavours include conducting experiments and keeping protocols, Findings is simply indispensable. It's a whole toolset of notes and indicators that allows you to keep track of anything and measure everything. From Physics to Sociology, it covers all processes and nuances. Cross-sectional, longitude, with multiple sampling and fifty variables? Ez pz.
TaskPaper: To-do list to have tasks at hand
Deep down you know that your memory did not undergo that tedious evolutionary process to cope with dry cleaning and groceries. Your mind is made for higher levels. That's why when it comes to routine, to-do lists are life saviors and should be used at all times. And TaskPaper is a perfect example: it has the simplicity of a sticker note, the search of a smart engine, and the cleanest interface.
XMind: Mind map for idea generation
Whenever you feel bubbling with ideas, use XMind. It's a brainstorming and idea-gathering tool. Visualise every possible solution or see how many studies refer to a specific topic. It's a fast and clear way to approach a complex subject and understand the big picture. And when it comes to drawing conclusions, mindmapping is a magic well of insights.
Every app on this list is available as a part of Setapp subscription and we have an Educational discount for a whole year. Try it out and see the difference a good toolset makes in studying.
Setapp lives on Mac and iOS. Please come back from another device.
Meantime, prepare for all the awesome things you can do with Setapp.
Read onSign Up
Setapp uses cookies to personalize your experience on our website. By continuing to use this site, you agree to our cookie policy.