Articles

When looking at options for to-do lists, there are so many tools. How to choose the right one? What are the best options for which kind of user?

Different apps are for different users. They focus on a different core audience. A user should not adapt to an app. The app should adapt to the user. Therefore, it is wise to select a task management suite after the available features. Minimalistic vs. feature packed? Simplicity vs. customizability?

This article will go over some of those decisions. Which are the important things to consider before choosing an app; and which different methodologies result in what different needs. Last, some recommendations suited to different user groups are given.

Your body plays a big and important role in life, and also in your work. If your body disagrees, you won’t be able to focus, and won’t be able to do efficient work.

A crucial factor is sleep. If not well rested, concentrating will feel hard. While possibly being able to physically come to work, the actual work will definitely not be very efficient, or as efficient as it could be.

Try to improve your productivity by having a good sleeping schedule and hygiene. There are many smaller things which can help with this. Tracking your sleeping time will give insight on what to improve. Using a smartwatch, like the Apple Watch, can help further.

After creating the habit of using to-do lists, they can get messy. What to put into a task management app? Where to start when structuring tasks, sub-tasks, and projects? Most apps have a variety of features, but it is hard to use them properly, especially for a beginner.

Especially if having a large amount of tasks, to-do list apps or task management systems can get out of hand. There are many things to do at once, but not everything can be done at once. Maybe stuff cannot even be done because something else needs to be finished first. Maybe there is a date attached, from when a task can be worked on.

Having a proper structure helps to create trust in the system and workflows, gaining security. It helps to be reliable and not forgetting tasks. Finally, it helps to tackle work which would be overwhelming, otherwise.

If one would try to summarize SaneBox with one catchphrase, it would be: Automated machine-learned email rules. This services’ goal is to minimize disturbance from the e-mail inbox. It does so by filtering unimportant emails into other folders. These rules are trained in the background without the need for user interaction.

SaneBox will figure out by itself, which e-mails are important. By analyzing the headers of previous e-mails, it will set up rules to sort your e-mails for you. It can also be used to snooze e-mails, get reminders for unreplied e-mails, automatically file e-mail attachments to Evernote, and more. Mind you, SaneBox is not an e-mail client. It is a platform agnostic service and will work entirely in the background.

How does it work? Will using SaneBox result in less distraction by e-mails? And why would one pay for custom e-mail rules? In this article we will discuss everything around SaneBox.

When digitally taking handwritten notes, it is easy to lose track of notebooks and documents. Stuff can simply get lost in large digital archives, and are hard to be tracked. Unlike typed documents, most applications won’t allow for indexing handwritten documents.

GoodNotes 4 comes to rescue. With a great text detection engine which even supports handwritten input, it can make all handwritten notes searchable. Even better: Exported documents have this information attached, so things can be filed away into other applications with peace of mind. This makes GoodNotes a great solution for taking handwritten notes in a paperless environment.

I take a look at this app and analyze how it can compete to other applications, how it is implemented and if it is worth your money.

Flexcil is an underdog in the group of annotation apps for the iPad. While rather new, it comes with some novel approach and fresh wind.

Everybody knows this situation: You work with a PDF, like literature or lecture slides, but then, you also want to take a couple of notes on the side in a notebook. Ideally, everything in digital. But, when having a PDF annotation app and another app for digital note-taking side-by-side, the multi-tasking capabilities of an iPad soon hit their limits.

Using Flexcil, you can work on multiple documents at once with an overlay interface. It supports dragging elements from your PDF to a notebook, and taking valuable notes in a scratchbook while still looking at the slides or book; all without leaving the app or using multi-tasking.

One of many usages of the iPad for productivity is the use of the Apple Pencil to take handwritten notes. Whether in meetings, lectures, or for simple brainstorming, having handwritten notes in a digital way is a handy way to archive notes and have them on the go with you all the time.

Noteshelf 2 is yet another competitor in the area of note-taking apps for the iPad. Utilizing the Apple Pencil, this app promises to be a good replacement for your traditional notebook.

I take a look at this app and analyze how it can compete to other applications, how it is implemented and if it is worth your money.

The regular new release of a new iPad has just passed, and people pick up their new gadgets. Or maybe, you are just thinking of picking one up? The iPad is a great tool for entertainment, watching movies, playing games. A leisure device. But can the iPad also excel for productivity purposes?

After the release of iOS 11 and iPad Pros, the introduction of peripherals like the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, the market of Apple tablets gets more and more professional. Apple markets the device as a laptop replacement. With it, developers try to fill the gap between 99 cent Candy Crush clones and Professional Grade software.

We take a look at recent advancements in this field, and how the tablet can be a great companion throughout your working day.

There are often things you read in web, which are actually interesting, but just come in the wrong moment. Directly before a meeting, or when actually searching for something completely unrelated.

It is still important to keep track of these things, ideally in a way that is archived, so even when the blog post in question disappears from the web, you can have access to this knowledge. Web clipping and read-later tools come to help.

This article will discuss a way to first use the Evernote web clipper efficiently for this purpose. Then, to not forget clipped items, it will look into ways to automate the workflow from web clipping an article to a reminder in your task management tool, and the right tagging to be able to actually retrieve older clipping.

While this website mainly consists of reviews and rather timeless methodology-related articles, the productivity world of course moves forward every day.

New apps are released, previous apps are updated with new features. This article will summarize stuff happening through March 2018.