My iPad has been my favorite productivity and organization tool lately. It’s small
enough to carry in my bag and it basically allows me to work anywhere I am, as well as
being a great tool to learn languages during my lunchbreak. It also acts as a great overall
organization tool; it’s basically a planner, a calendar and a bullet journal all in one
and **today** I want to walk you through my favorite organization and productivity apps
and show you how I have been managing most of my projects. Before we start, just a quick
reminder that (1) not all of the apps listed today are free; if you are only interested
in free apps, I will link down below some videos I’ve created featuring free apps
or apps with solid free versions. And (2) of course that this is a 2019 update of my
favorite iOS apps which means that although some of these will be new to some of you,
I still work with most of my favorites so you can expect some repetition when comparing
to previous versions of this video.
- So the first app I want to show you is a new favorite and it’s Timepage by Moleskine;
Timepage works as a calendar app that, first of all, has an incredibly stylish look and
secondly, uses a tiered interface to combine events, maps, contacts and weather information
into one place only. It synchs with your Google or iCalendar so there is no need to setup
the app individually or worry about created events not being transferred over to your
pre-existing main calendar. You can customize the app with a light and dark mode as well
as a main color of your preference for the main interface. Timepage features multiple
views that can be accessed with different gestures and it’s basically a very solid
app that I find very fun to navigate and organize with. Timepage costs 1.99 USD monthly or 11.99
USD yearly. - And the great thing about Timepage is that
it’s an app that seamlessly connects to another app by Moleskine called Actions. Actions
is basically a dashboard that compiles tasks into color coded lists and allows you to schedule
them for specific days and assign them a reminder. These cards are then synched with Timepage
so when you open the app you can find your tasks listed right below your list of events
for that day. The good thing about having separate apps is that with Actions you are
able to see all of your tasks at a glance and reorganize them according to their degree
of importance, while in Timepage they are listed according to date. Inside the Actions
app, you can also check your past log and take a look at all of the tasks you’ve completed
recently which is basically a pat on the back for your hard work. Actions costs 1.99 USD
monthly or 11.99 USD yearly. - A free app that I’m completely obsessed
with is Google spreadsheets; I use Spreadsheets to basically organize anything that either
involves numbers like multi-purpose budgets or information that is more complex and needs
the structure of a spreadsheet. I update these documents so often that I prefer to have them
stored online since everyone I share them with will also have immediate access to the
latest version. Despite not having the entire list of features that for instance Microsoft
Excel provides, Google spreadsheets provides a solid enough version for most of your organization
needs. - For anything concerning PDF editing and
annotating, you can trust today’s sponsor, PDFelement, to help you be more productive
when managing all of your documents. PDFelement For iOS is free and supports PDF editing,
annotating and converting, featuring tools that allow you to highlight text, add your
own comments and share everything easily. You can highlight the most important information
in documents, el; adding text boxes or sticky notes uses a drag-and-drop mechanic which
helps you annotate the text as you go. As an added bonus you can use PDFelement to scan
physical documents and immediately create a PDF version that you can then sign and share
easily. Also, if you’re looking for an all-in-one online PDF solution you can also use HiPdf
for easy document conversion. All the links for PDFelement and HiPdf will be provided
in the description box below. - But my favorite organization app of all
of these is still Notion and I won’t ramble too much about it since I have a lot of videos
(also linked down below) that cover the essentials. I use Notion for anything that needs more
complex databases. It also acts as my major brainstorming app. It’s also the place where
I write my scripts for YouTube, brainstorm for future videos and organize my workflow.
It contains in-depth planning of long-term projects, and lists that I want to access
and edit on the long-term as well, like a bucket list, reading lists etc. Also, most
of the notes and project planning related to my job is being managed via Notion. The
app is currently free for students and educators so you can get access to your free version
by following the instructions down below. It also has a free plan available with a limit
of 1000 blocks that you can manage by creating multiple workspaces. Notion’s personal plan
costs 4 dollars a month. - GoodNotes 5 is the app that I use for complex
document creation involving mostly handwriting. GoodNotes mimics a natural handwritten experience
for your tablet especially if you’re using an Apple Pencil. You can easily add text and
highlight, as well as typed text, images, charts and other types of information. Meanwhile,
the different tools featured in GoodNotes allow you to highlight and comment your own
text while you’re at it and even insert image files that can resemble stick notes
for that added visual enhancement. The great thing about this app, though, is that you
can create your own notebooks, rearrange the pages, edit and add external documents and
choose different page types and formats. This allows you to customize your digital notes
as much as possible to mimic the same experience with traditional notebooks or notepads. GoodNotes
5 is a one-time only purchase and the last time I checked it cost 7.99 dollars.
- If handwriting notes is not entirely possible or simply not adequate to the situation at
hand, I simply rely on Google Docs for all of my document creation. I like it better
than Microsoft Word because (1) it’s free, (2) it has simple tools that work very well
and most of all, it allows me to share the document easily with windows and macOS slash
iOS users and it can be edited in collaboration in real time.
- For email productivity I still think that the OG Gmail app is the best thing out here.
It does a fantastic work of automatically separating your mail to different inboxes,
throwing all of your promotional, marketing emails in one place, social notifications
in another and keeping your most important messages nicely highlighted in your main inbox.
Gmail also allows you to label messages accordingly and has a great view that indexes shared documents
to your inbox so you can see right away all of the files attached to your mail. Finally,
Gmail has almost seamless support of different e-mail accounts that you can switch back and
forth in minutes.
You can find links to all of these apps in the description box below. I hope you’ve
enjoyed today’s video and I’ll see you next week. Bye guys!