Lizzie
Google Community Manager
Google Community Manager

Hello everyone,

 

My feed is constantly brimming with new ways to be productive, and whether your go-to method is to-do lists or time blocking, one thing they have in common is that apps and tools can make a huge difference! In the interest of working smarter, we asked a few folks in our team to share the apps that help them stay ahead of the workday.

Our most-used productivity apps

In no particular order, here’s what they came back with…can you tell we work at Google? 🙈

 

  • Organise your notes and set reminders: Google Keep lets you capture, edit, share and collaborate on your notes. A stand out feature for our team is the location-based and time-based reminders, that let you set and forget until that relevant on-site meeting. Right notes, right place, right time. 

 

  • Choose the right playlist to motivate you: There’s nothing like music or a podcast to drown out the distractions and help you focus on a project. Several of the team  loves Spotify and the personalised daily music mixes. Not only do we discover new music, but there’s less wasting time torn between Taylor Swift or Fleetwood Mac, and more diving straight into a spot-on soundtrack to spur on that next big idea. 

 

  • Coordinate your time: It might seem obvious, but we’d be lost without Google Calendar. As well as keeping track of meetings, you can also check the availability of team members, making scheduling so much easier. This applies to home life too. Family and friends can add events into your personal section, so you never miss a birthday or ball game again. 

 

  • To-do lists: Google Tasks is a fantastic to-do tool that helps you get things done. You can create tasks from anywhere, add details and subtasks, and then integrate them with Gmail and Calendar. The question is, do you add tasks you’ve already done for the dopamine hit? (We can't be the only ones.)

 

  • Manage your projects or daily tasks: For cross-functional projects, Asana is a management maestro. It helps us focus on individual tasks and the bigger picture, with workflows, dependencies and deadlines in one place. The ‘My Tasks’ section makes it easy to see everything that’s been assigned to you, and has tools to prioritise. And feedback flows easily through comments, likes and uploads directly on tasks. 

 

  • Happy inbox, happy life! Classic for a reason, Gmail makes it super simple to stay on top of emails, and integrates seamlessly with workspace, so you can see calendar invitations and chat with colleagues without having to switch between apps. Adding labels to emails is also a great way to manage what you need to reply to and when. Our global team loves the schedule send feature, which lets you send emails at a time that's convenient for your recipients. It's a win-win for productivity and wellbeing!

Now it’s your turn!

 

​​These are just a few of our favourites and there are many apps out there that can help. We're always looking for new ways to be more productive, so we'd love to hear about your favourite apps and hacks. 

 

Whether they're Google apps or not, let us know in the comments below. And if you do use any of the same apps as us, what are some of your most used features?

 

We, and the community, thank you!

 

2 Comments
Moombas
Level 3.0: Honeycomb

Yeah, i think i see the poke to Google products on some of the points and really understand it on a Google forum 😉

But i like to say that most of the things mentioned above are fine "in general" and have to agree to them but can also be done with other programs / apps as well.

Let's give some examples:

  • Organise your notes and set reminders / ToDo List: MS OneNote for Notesa and sharing them and the integrated Task scheduler in Outlook is used by me all the time during work for planned activites which are not bound to a meeting and which are reminders or Tasks.
  • Choose the right playlist to motivate you: I don't have any specific preference for a program/app on this but i miss really the availability of a local program for some of the services so i prefer local stored music to be played. 
  • Coordinate your time / Happy inbox, happy life!: As already said, time coordination is covered by MS Outlook as well, with the integrated calendar and my inbox is sorting itself for 90% to get the mails into right place and worked on imediatelly.
  • Manage your projects or daily tasks: As this is often company decision to which service etc. to work on, i don't have a big opinion on this.

 

And that there's often no (Windows) program available where you have an app available for things to work on, is often a reason not to work with several apps.

 

So, in final i can say: I prefer to have as less programs used as possible to cover as much as possible work related things. Also regarding Google mail / calendar etc. i definitely miss a local (Windows) program covering most needs in one, so that's why I would always avoid Google Mail/Calendar etc. (i don't like big browser sessions / many multiple tabs/windows to have access to mail etc.). And this also goes for private.

hannah
Level 1.5: Cupcake

So I have this dreadful addiction to opening up tabs. In fact, multiple tabs in the Chrome and Edge, along with the ability to have multiple profiles, are the bane of my existence. Its not uncommon for me to have 2 or 3 different profiles on edge open...with anywhere from 3 to 10 browser windows, and 20 -30 tabs open in every window. Then there's Chrome...just go ahead and double the first set of numbers...SO....i had to figure out something to allow me to keep all of my tabs which I will eventually either read through all the way or at least skim through until I decide its not what im looking for. So there is an extension that I installed in both browsers, on all my profiles, and its called "Copy All Urls" . This allows me to copy every URL from every tab in just a straight list of urls, orI can customize the output like if I wanted to put the entire list into a markdown file, I could configure it as [%title%](%url%)...SO I dont know if it has really helped my productivity so much as it has helped my .....disorganization. But then, the second step is...sinc I never throw a tab away until its been read or skimmed, I have to paste those tabs somewhere. Sometimes its VSCode, into a markdown file....but most of the time, its Microsoft's Sticky Notes. Then I can go back later, pull up the sticky note, copy the url list, and use the same extension to now paste the list and all urls open in a new tab....Voila! I have been told that there is an actual name for this Something like Compulsive Tab Disorder, or something...Whatever its called...Its definitely a thing...