Top 10 Productivity Tools for 2023
Do you want to be more productive in 2023? Let's get you on some tools that will definitely 10x your Productivity. Here are our favorites.
BONUS: do check out Mike Strives' video on his top 5!
1. Endel - for focus music!
One of the most important factors for getting into focus mode, is to listen to music. Specifically, music that's optimized for your brain.
We found music created for games is optimized specifically to focus.
Besides playlists on Spotify and YouTube videos, there are also a couple of amazing tools and apps that you can listen to, such as Brain.fm, and, our favorite, Endel.
Endel's patented technology creates personalized soundscapes and reacts to your personal inputs like the time of the day, the weather, your own heart rate (if connected to your health apps), and the location you're at.
We especially love their native MacOs integration, which lets you easily play and pause sounds and music to focus or fall asleep better:
Endels' team consists of neuroscientists that are designing music and sounds consistent to improve your focus and lower your stress.
Pricing:
Try it for free at https://endel.io/
2. Notion - for documenting, writing, and more!
A true all-in-one solution to store all of your thoughts, ideas, tasks, to-dos, notes, and more would be Notion.
You can use it, just like Mike does, as a second brain, but it's truly an all-in-one software with lots of templates to choose from, so it's a perfect fit for almost any type of use case.
The best thing about Notion is that it has a very big and active community. So, you'll find tons of blog posts, communities, YouTube videos, Tweets, and more on how to use Notion.
And there are amazing default templates available in the software itself:
As from users in the community:
So, if you're ready to start with:
- Documenting your journey
- Journaling
- Track your habits and goals
- List your to-dos
- Or anything else!
Start exploring Notion :)
Pricing:
Free to start!
3. BeFocused - for working with Pomodoro
Now, we need to admit something. We do like working with physical stuff like notebooks and, in this case, a Pomodoro timer as well :)
However, in these times of the digital age, we are working with an app for tracking our Pomoro sessions as well.
BeFocused would be our pick, as it has a really good integration on both iPhone, Android, macOS, and iPad.
Especially the native macOS integration works really well:
A good, and also free, alternative would be our Notion Template which has a Pomodoro Timer integrated:
But yeah, BeFocused is definitely recommended if you want to work on multiple devices in sync.
Pricing:
Free - or a one-time fee of $6 to unlock all features.
4. LlamaLife - for personal task management
One of the most beautiful task managers we came across is Llama Life!
It's a beautiful web-based app that lets you design your daily routine based on your own schedule, or you can use custom templates like the Pomodoro one.
One of the cool things is that you can design different parts of the day, like your morning routine, by simply adding new tasks and setting timers:
However, the reason why some of our team members are using this for their personal tasks, and we're not using this company-wide, is because of one simple reason: it lacks native integrations with, for example, iPhone and Chrome.
Although its founder is about to work on that (we're guessing):
Building a desktop web app…
— Marie Ng 🦙 (@threehourcoffee) January 8, 2023
🎉 Pros: can update immediately, no long tedious app review process
😅 Cons: customers still try to use it on their phone, running into a few strange bugs, and want a native app
Pricing:
Start free (for as long as you want!)
5. Blinkist - for reading books (kinda)
So one of the best hacks into productivity, and specifically, learning new things quickly, is to start using Blinkist, an app to read book summaries.
With Blinkist, you can read, or listen, to books on any of your preferred devices. It has a web-based solution, an app for iPhone, Android, and iPad.
Within 30 minutes, you've read a new book and learned tons of lessons!
The best thing about reading book summaries with Blinkist is that it lets you easily create notes and highlights from each book, which you can later on revisit and reread.
We have read tons of books this way:
And, what we love the most, is that Blinkist will curate new book suggestions and book lists based on your reading behavior and reviews.
This way, we discovered new books we learned from! :)
Pricing:
Start a 7-day trial for free!
6. Hypefury - for scheduling Tweets
If you're into Twitter, you're going to love Hypefury!
It's basically your personal assistant to automate your Twitter game and grow your audience.
It has some really neat features built-in that will make working with Twitter so much more productive, like the smart reply feature in which you're able to reply really fast in one overview:
One of our favorite features is an ideation center to discover and craft new tweets based on proven and well-performed tweets from others:
You can create and schedule tweets in advance, which makes it really easy to just work 1 or 2 hours a week on your Twitter game and let it run on auto-pilot!
Pricing + DEAL!
Start using it for FREE via this link + code 20C3M1A for 20% off!
7. Rize - for time management
Wow, if there's one tool that has proven its value in actually optimizing our productivity workflow, it's Rize!
It has an amazing time-tracking dashboard that gives you the perfect overview of how you spend your time. This way, you can optimize your routines and workflow by looking at the real-time data.
Rize tells you exactly how much time you spend on focus work (doing the actual work in deep focus work mode!) or if you're spending (too much) of your time on doing meetings.
The best thing? It works fully automated!
Rize will automatically track and categorize your activity in real time. So this way, you'll be able to understand how to reclaim focus time and how to optimize your breaks and, for example, meetings.
Pricing + DEAL!
Start with a free plan, and if you need to upgrade, use this link and the code 'MIKESTRIVES' for 25% off!
8. Strive - for taking notes and working on tasks
Nothing beats writing down your tasks and to-dos and crossing off the things you've completed. That feeling is unbeatable! Well, with the Strive Notebook, which is designed specifically based on the Now, Next, Not Yet productivity method, you can do so!
The Strive Notebook Journal isn't a typical notebook. It contains the proven framework Now, Next, Not Yet, which basically means that you have to prioritize your tasks daily.
This works really well. It immediately enhances your focus and clears the path for your next tasks.
It furthermore gives you all kinds of tools to work with tasks in the most efficient way possible, as described in its introduction:
Our team loves it and we're using it on a daily basis.
Pricing + DEAL!
$15 per notebook
Use code BRAIN10 for a 10% discount!
9. Missive - for email collaboration
Who says email can't be fun? If you think that, you clearly haven't tried working on emails with Missive ;)
It's such a beautifully designed tool, and it basically works as your all-in-one inbox. Because besides email, you're able to receive all kinds of messages from different platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and your website chat such as Crisp as well.
The best features, in our opinion, are the ones that are very convenient when working in teams.
Think about having an internal and private conversation about certain emails or messages before hitting reply:
Or assigning emails to your colleagues, partners, or even departments:
Pricing
Start for free here.
10. Forest app - for daily to-dos
One of the most fun ways of working on your daily to-dos and tasks is by building a forest with the Forest app. Wait, what? Building a forest. Yes, literally:
Each time you've completed a task, the app will grow a tree in your own personal forest. When you fail to complete it, a tree will vanish.
This way, it's basically your personal accountability system.
We mean, who would want to lose their own forest, right?!
The best thing?
The forest app team is actually planting real trees with the revenue from the app!
Pricing: