At Work: The 7 Productivity Apps I Can’t Live Without

I USED TO joke with P that This Is Glamorous began as the musings of a girl in her underwear. While that may not be strictly true (sometimes I wore track pants), the casual work-from-home attire did not mean that I did not get things done. On the contrary, the time saved from having to do hair and makeup and finding an outfit to wear and the travel time to work meant that I could really focus on the tasks ahead. Over the years, I have adopted many systems for running all factions of TIG and many of these include time-saving productivity apps. Here are 7 of my very favourites, the ones that I honestly can’t live without…

The first app on the list is LastPass, an auto-pilot password manager for all your passwords. If you’re like me, you have a million different online accounts―email, shopping, social media, websites, etc. And since we’re very serious about web safety here at TIG, we do not use the same password for everything, and remembering all the passwords for all of the accounts we have would be crazy. This app remembers all your passwords across all your devices for you, and it’s free. It saves me so much time logging in to everything every day, that it is indispensable and my favourite app.

Dropbox is a file hosting service with cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. There’s already a lot of memory on my iMac and we use external drives as well, so I don’t use Dropbox for storage so much as for uploading and downloading image files from my desktop to my phone and vice versa. Sometimes files will be edited using apps on my phone or using Photoshop on my desktop, and Dropbox is used to get them to the right place for posting on TIG or our social media accounts as necessary. We also use it to share large folders of images files with clients, or for our contributors to share image files with us for their work on the site. It’s one of the apps that we use everyday.

Jumpcut is a macOS clipboard manager with fast and easy access to your clipboard history, using an interface that stays out of the way. If you’re doing a million things at once like we are, you’ll know how frustrating it can be to copy something to your clipboard, forget, and copy over it. Jumpcut saves time by giving you immediate access to the URL, code snippet, phone number, or whatever that you have copied just a few minutes ago. Although P told me about this extension a couple of years ago, it’s apparently been around for over fifteen years. It’s amazing and I really couldn’t live without it.

I was happily using Simplenote before it suddenly began to get a bit buggy and refuse to sync correctly. I also had trouble deleting old notes and then began to worry about privacy. After searching around for something similar, I came across Standard Notes and it’s actually even better. It syncs automatically between my desktop and phone, and is safe, as it is completely encrypted. I love this app and even trust it to keep important things, like snippets of writing.

We have been using the to-do list app Wunderlist for years for keeping things organised at both Belgrave Crescent and The Shop. It’s a cloud-based task management application for storing ideas and dreams, and of course, your lists of things to do. It has since been discontinued and replaced by Microsoft To Do. We decided to moved all our lists over there, as it’s still better than most of the other to-do list apps out there: you can easily share your lists, and collaborate with colleagues and co-workers, as well as delegate to-dos. Plus, it works on your smartphone, tablet, computer and smartwatch.

Toby is a visual workspace that lives on every new browser tab. If you’re like me and have a trillion tabs open at once and get a bit overwhelmed from time time, you can use this app to save and close all tabs except the ones you are working on. You can add new tabs by dragging and dropping each browser tab into collections or save a whole session with one click. You can access all of your collections on any desktop with automatic sync, and use tags to organise your collections or create notes for your to-dos. We have a running collection of tabs for our upcoming Weekend Links article every week and add to it as we go along.

January 2023 Update: I no longer use Toby, having transferred all of my bookmarks there to Raindrop.io, after things got too unruly. This app is much more visual and interactive⏤you can save text and images in addition links from the internets; upload images and files, and even add notes and photos from your phone. xR.

Convert Case is not an app, but a very useful website for when your text is in accidentally in all-caps, or lowercase and you don’t want to start again and retype it all. You change text from sentence case, lower case, upper case, capitalized case and more. It saves a lot of time, and for this reason, makes the essentials list.