Productivity can be enhanced with the right apps. Do more in less time with these 7 tools for productivity!

The Noun Project

In the last year I am writing a fair share of proposals and specifications for software apps as part of my job at eHealth Africa. Text is good for detail, but nothing beats the power of images, so I try to add diagrams whenever I can. But who enjoys ugly diagrams? A couple of my colleagues were doing gorgeous ones and one day I decided to ask for their secret. They shared it with me, and today I share it with you.

The noun project is made by the people at ZenDesk and it is a collection of icons you can download for free to use on your designs and presentations. Just give it a keyword and let the magic happen!

Typeform

You’ve probably found yourself wanting to quickly build a form in the last couple of months – for collecting feedback, for your website contact form or for organising an event.

I used to default to Google Forms but always hated the designs and the fact that they were not customisable. Then I found typeform. It helps you build nice looking forms and it supports embedded images and videos.

You have a ton of ready to use forms you can tweak a little to fit your use case; and it even gives you analytics about the devices used to fill them in or the average time to complete. Of course free text, drop downs, radio buttons and a lot more are supported. And from $0.00!

Github

Some project managers may not like it, but most developers do, and so do I! I love GitHub so much that I even use it to manage this website and my social media channels.

GitHub is a web based git repository hosting platform – meaning it’s a place where you can host code that’s managed using git. You can read more about git here, but long story short it helps you with the classical versioning and review problems.

GitHub also has an issue tracker and a wiki for each project, so little by little it has become the place where I organise my tasks. And a solution I recommend to friends looking for project management apps, too.

It lets you add tags, collaborate with other people and keeps a history of every change. If you are into collaboration and open source and you don’t know GitHub, I seriously encourage you to take a look.

Public repositories are free and private repositories are available for your secret projects. And remember, git is not just for code!

ZenHub

ZenHub is probably the reason I spend that much time inside of GitHub :).

If you follow this blog you probably know of my love for Kanban boards and you may have even this blog post about how I use GitHub and ZenHub together to stay organised. I won’t repeat myself – just click, click.

Inforgr.am

Infographics were on vogue a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t help but falling in love with them.

I am an information addict and infographics are a quick and easy way to get my daily fix. And there are infographics about anything out there. Even about how 2014 was for yours-truly!

If you like them too and you want to create your own infogr.am is the way to go. It’s easy, just drag and drop the chart type you want to use and enter the data. You can even link them to data sources you store somewhere and have infogr.am update the visualisations in real time as your data changes.

Timeanddate.com

Time and date is on my bookmark bar because it helps me with weather, bank holidays in different countries, world days of xyz (don’t miss Talk Like a Pirate day!) and basically anything time related.

I used it every single day when I had to schedule calls with different time zones back in my ‘working with coworking spaces literally all around the world’ and I use it to calculate the number of days between two dates as a project manager now. I wrote a post with some cool stuff it can help you do, and on top of that I recommend you take a look at their meeting scheduler feature.

Google Alerts

If something happens Google (or now Alphabet) knows. I read the news 98% of the days, but I usually go for the newspaper I’ve been reading for most of my life and then trust twitter to let me know if anything happens.

In the last months, however, I’ve decided to add Google News to my sources, as it is very convenient specially when travelling or if I want to know what the Internet says about me. Google Alerts sends notifications to my inbox when something happens, so now I don’t need to worry as much if I don’t read the newspaper on a given day.