5 apps for a more effective workday

Sven Dahlin from Sweden is the COO for North-West Europe at Global Savings Group and CupoNation. He lives and breathes efficiency in the office environment, and in this article he presents five of his favourite apps for saving time during the workday.

1. TINY SCANNER

This app makes the scanning of documents (or similar) super-easy by enabling you to use the camera on your smartphone. You just take photos of the papers that need to be scanned, and Tiny Scanner takes care of cropping them into the right format, adjusting the light setting and putting them all together in a PDF document. In the end, you just decide where you want to store or share it.

The quality that Tiny Scanner provides is more than good enough for everything from contracts to receipts, and the way that it is connected to sharing apps – ranging from WhatsApp to Dropbox – really makes Tiny Scanner an easier and more efficient option than using an old fashioned scanner.

Find out more:

appxy.com/tinyscan

Download for free:

iTunes

Google Play

2. TODOIST

Everyone has those small tasks that they need to remember to do at some point during the day or week, but that don’t have a specific timeframe. Rather than cluttering up your standard work calendar with them, an app like Todoist can be a good alternative. Put the assignments in Todoist, and you’ll get a notice about what you have to do “today” every morning. When you finish a task, just mark it as done. It’s easy to move tasks around, postponing them to the next day or the next week, and you can also categorise them into for example private and work related tags.

Find out more:

en.todoist.com

Download for free:

iTunes

Google Play

3. TRELLO

This is the perfect app for aligning projects that several people are working on at the same time. Trello makes it very easy to see how far along you are in the pipeline of different projects, who is responsible for the different pieces of the puzzle, and what happens next.

The app also makes it easy for you and your co-workers to have a clear overview of your projects, making the workflow 10 times smoother for everyone involved.

Find out more:

trello.com

Download for free:

iTunes

Google Play

4. OFFICE SYNDROME

This app (or similar ones) should be recommended by any manager to their employees. Why? Some physical exercise during the workday is really important for being effective and staying healthy. No, we’re not talking about going for a run during lunch, but simple stretch exercises that everyone can do. Office Syndrome gives you a warning when it’s time to do a few of them, and you decide how many times a day you want to stretch.

Download for free:

Google Play

5. DROPBOX

Dropbox is a popular app that lets you store all your files safely in “the cloud”, with access to them anywhere, at any time, whether it is on you pc, your phone or your tablet. The cloud refers to the fact that your files are not stored locally on your device, but on servers owned by Dropbox. It's the modern equivalent of an external hard drive.

The free version comes with 2 GB of storage space, but a lot of companies tend to buy business accounts for their employees, which provide unlimited space. No matter what account you have, Dropbox makes it easy to collaborate on different projects – for example, in combination with Trello.

Find out more:

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