That’s understandable because you’ve got to be on top of several things. From managing clients and customers to taking care of accounting, your ‘to-do’ list keeps getting longer and longer. Luckily, some of the best productivity apps for small businesses are here to help.

Why do small businesses need to consider productivity apps?

All tasks are not equally important. Some are routine tasks that together take a lot of your time. An hour saved in these chores is an hour you can invest in your most important tasks. This is important for a small business owner since you may not have an extensive team.

Why productivity apps are more important than ever in 2021

Productivity apps are some of the most sought-after mobile-friendly apps for small business owners in 2021. That’s primarily because of two factors.

Remote work has put more pressure on small business owners and freelancers. Without the need for physical meetings, orders are placed faster than before. Secondly, the modern world has also created needless digital correspondence.

Without the right time management tools, you’ll end up wasting several hours every week.

7 best productivity apps for small business

For project management: Asana

Both a productivity and project management app, Asana makes it easy to set goals, deadlines, create projects and manage them. Teams can use threads to communicate with each other and visualisation tools to see project reports. It’s the app you need to manage all your goals and projects in one place.

Pricing

Basic: Free

Premium: £8.04/month

Business: £18.29/month

For taking notes: OneNote

It’s easy to put all your ideas and notes in one place with an app like OneNote. You can save your notes as notebooks with easy-to-use sections. You can also copy from a website with the URL and use a stylus to write.

Pricing

Free

For to-do lists: Todoist

You can create a to-do list for yourself and your team members. You can add more information on the tasks that others can see and click off the tasks once they are completed. Todoist also makes it exceptionally easy to visualise your projects.

Pricing

Basic: Free

Premium: £2.20/month

Business: £3.66/month

For automation: IFTTT

With IFTTT, you can integrate apps, services and devices and trigger automation. For example, you don’t have to manually save your email attachments in Google Drive. The app will do that. Such integrations and automation will save you precious time and ensure that you don’t miss out on crucial tasks because you’re busy.

Pricing

Basic: Free

Pro: £2.92/month

Developer: £73.21/year

For focus: Focus@will

Focus@will offers you sequenced playlists based on neuroscience after understanding your personality type. It analyses how you work, think and get distracted. If you or your team has to work in an open office, you should give this a try.

Pricing

Annual: £38.45/year

Two-Year: £32.95/year

VIP: £164.75 as a one-time payment

For collaboration: Slack

This is how small and medium enterprises collaborate the world over. Slack enables you to communicate with your entire staff or a select team. Its interface is easy to use and it will ensure that you don’t end up sending or receiving needless emails or texts.

Pricing

Basic: Free

Standard: £4.88/user/month

Plus: £9.15/user/month

For time management: RescueTime

Ever wondered what takes up your time on your laptop, tablet or smartphone? RescueTime will tell you that and the first time you use it, you could be in for a surprise. Its premium version will also let you have FocusTime where you won’t be able to access social media or other distracting sites or apps.

Pricing

Basic: Free

Premium: £6.58/user/month

In short

As a business owner, time is your most important asset. With the help of the best productivity apps for small businesses, you’ll be able to get some time back every day. You’ll learn how much of your time is wasted and how many of the tasks can be automated.