4 Fruitful Apps To Boost Your Productivity Right Away

Technology surrounds much of our lives. It distracts us from the real world, helps us feel more connected with it, and in some cases keeps us from doing what we need to do. In a world where virtually everyone has a computer in their pocket it’s easy to pull it out anywhere and avoid all responsibility. However, at the very same time our phones can be an endlessly useful tool for helping tackle those responsibilities.Here are four phone applications you need to make yourself more productive.

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Todoist
Agendas can be expensive and a lot easier to lose than a phone. At the very least, a phone is almost always closer by. Todoist not only helps keep you organized, it’s an easy to use digital agenda.
You can add an event or task to any day no matter where you are in the application. As long as you hit the plus sign in the bottom right corner of the screen and type the day, time and task in the text box, the app will automatically schedule it for you. So you don’t have to break down the specifics in separate sections of the program. Making a list of things for the week is as easy as five minutes on a Monday morning.

The home screen of the app will show a group of folders with the ability to hold different tasks in different categories. Plug in your schedule for work into a specific folder, or have one for hobbies or separate personal endeavors. In addition to this you can see a page that will show you everything you need to do in the next seven days no matter what category it falls into. But if you want to see the bigger picture just look at your inbox and find all of your active tasks.
If physical agendas aren’t for you, Todoist definitely is.

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Elevate
Most of the stuff we learn in our early days of school can drop off after a while of being in post-secondary school. Our focus turns to this strange transition from adolescence to adulthood and figuring out how to live on our own. But Elevate is here to help you keep up on the basics of education with just ten minutes of fun phone games every day.

The app breaks down learning into five different categories: writing, listening, speaking, reading and math. Each of the categories has their own set of fun and intuitive games which have a unique and effective way of helping you retain the lessons.

With listening games you can learn how to remember names and match them to faces and personalities more effectively, while also retaining the topics you’ve talked about with people throughout your day. Math games teaches you fractions, measuring and estimation to help you in daily tasks like grocery shopping or cooking. The writing and speaking games help you build a strong vocabulary and sentence structuring skills while also teaching you how to dampen stage anxiety. And reading games increase your ability to retain important information from books, articles, magazines and pretty much anything with text on it.
Elevate also does a great job of tracking your progress. Every day your performance will land on a line chart with all of your previous achievements in a single game. You can see where you are improving and falling short easily in a way that will encourage you to do better the next time. You’ll also gain skill levels in each of the categories.

The best part of all this? It’s free (unless you want to play two extra games a day).

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Headpace
There’s been a lot of talk about incorporating meditation into our lives. But how do you meditate? Is it really beneficial? Do you even have time?

For the application Headspace, all those questions are easily and exceptionally answered. You will have to pay for most of the content, which includes specific meditations for anxiety, anger, depression and a handful of other things worth gaining some head space over. But the most valuable, yet free, feature in the app is the ten day introductory lesson to meditation.

For about ten minutes every day for ten days you can l sit down and listen to a man with a calm British accent walk you through the steps of reaching mindfulness. Each of the audio lessons are introduced with a fun animation to explain what you’ll be going through and what the benefits will be. The first lesson is going to walk you through the entire process of meditation – when to focus on sounds, when to focus on touch, and when to focus on breathing. But by the time you make it to the tenth and final walkthrough the calm British man simple gets you started and tells you when time is up.

It can be simple organizing your physical items but, Headspace will help organize all the thoughts that get jumbled up from time to time.

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WealthSimple
A start-up from Toronto with a focus on making investing easier for everyone. Michael Katchen developed Wealthsimple to make automatic investing easier and mobile. The app helps find you an investor without the hassle of going out to multiple firms until you find one that fits your needs. It’s all done on your phone and you get to define the boundaries in which you feel comfortable investing.

Wealthsimple comes with an annual service fee of 0.5% or 0.4% of your annual investment return depending on how much money you want to diversify. For comparison, the average Canadian pay 2.5%.

This app allows you to have more time for other things in your life. With regular investment firms you’ll be waiting for detailed reports on your returns and where your money is going. With Wealthsimple all you have to do is read through your phone for five minutes any time you want to check up on your accounts. The detailed report is with you all the time and constantly updated.

For young professionals who want to start saving and making money, but don’t have the time between work or studies and social life, Wealthsimple makes your wealth… simple.