7 Productivity Apps That Will Make Your Life More Efficient

Ever reach the end of the day and wonder where all your time went?

I keep reading articles where the author points out that all of us—from millionaires to humble knowledge workers—have the same twenty-four hours in the day.

Sure, this is meant to be inspiring (you too can achieve your dreams!), but when it’s already noon and I’ve barely started my to-do list . . . it just feels depressing.

Fortunately, there is hope for those of us struggling with productivity. If you’re frustrated and ready to get more out of your time, here are seven productivity apps that will make your life more efficient. (Grammarly’s Mobile Keyboard for iOS is also a must-have).

1Asana

Ever struggle to keep track of all your To-Dos? Asana is the perfect productivity app for managing your million and one tasks.

Visually organize your projects in lists or as boards, break projects into tasks and subtasks, set due dates, include notes and attachments, and even assign tasks to collaborators.

Asana is great for organizing complex projects, like taking your novel from concept to publication, as well as ongoing tasks like posting to your blog each week.

And there’s no end to the type of projects it can help you manage. Launching your new side hustle, coordinating the ultimate weekend getaway, organizing your group presentation with classmates—Asana has you covered.

Teasing you all here: This is how I schedule my content using @asana H/T to @dottotech for the brilliant idea. #Content #Productivity pic.twitter.com/AxLcgkzBv5

— Carl Pullein (@carl_pullein) November 10, 2017

2Rescue Time

In the immortal words of management guru Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

RescueTime helps you improve your time management by automatically tracking how you spend your computer time. It runs silently in the background, then creates handy graphs of your time-use statistics so you can see exactly where your time is going each day.

The Premium version also includes the FocusTime feature which allows you to block “distracting” sites (wow!), and pop up alerts if you’ve been spending your time unproductively.

#RescueTime is great for holding yourself accountable to staying focused and not slipping onto #Facebook. https://t.co/YYSOwN7t0G pic.twitter.com/tghZOAz7Sp

— Endless Events (@helloendless) April 2, 2017

3Timepage

Need a better way to manage your schedule? There are a lot of calendar apps out there, but few come close to the elegance and simplicity of Moleskin’s Timepage.

Notable features include: detailed weather forecasts, driving/travel time estimates, a heatmap of your month’s busiest days, event countdown clocks, and a daily briefing. Not to mention the aesthetics are gorgeous, the design is super user-friendly, and details like colors and fonts are endlessly customizable.

Show up to your next event on time, stress-free, and rain-free.

#Timepage turns time planning into a visual pleasure. Discover our first calendar app: https://t.co/cwAYI3YU3r pic.twitter.com/g93rV7Azwg

— Moleskine (@moleskine) May 21, 2016

4IFTTT

This ingenious app connects your favorite apps and services, allowing you to automate simple tasks, thus saving time and freeing up your brain power for more important things.

IFTTT stands for “If This, Then That.” For example, “If I post a picture on Instagram, save it to Dropbox.”

You can choose from hundreds of pre-made “applets” or create your own. Some popular IFTTT applets:

Automatically send my partner a text when I leave work. Share my Instagram photos as native photos on Twitter. Turn on porch lights when I get close to home. Add new movie releases (US) to Google calendar.

There’s no excuse to tweet Instagram links! Here’s how to tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter @IFTTT https://t.co/9sMByPUYZP

— Meruschka (@MzansiGirl) October 26, 2017

51Password

Are you still using the same password for all your accounts? Or going crazy hunting for the password you wrote on a sticky note somewhere?

Stop wasting time and jeopardizing your security! 1Password generates unique passwords for all of your logins and protects them with a triple encryption protocol. All you have to do is remember your Master Password.

1Password is integrated with your browser, syncs automatically with your devices, and can even save other sensitive information like credit card numbers.

Oh look! I’m on Product Hunt! �� https://t.co/EOGwiuv0OY

— 1Password (@1Password) November 3, 2017

6Strides

Want to get more sleep? Eat more veggies? Spend less time on social media? Spend more time writing?

Use Strides to track your progress on any habit or goal. There’s a library of popular goals to choose from, or you can create your own.

Similar to RescueTime, the magic of Strides is in its ability to measure your progress and keep you motivated.

I just paid money for this app in the hopes it will help me get my life together @StridesApp #StridesApp pic.twitter.com/yS4AEjvXUL

— Kathryn (@Future_Goddess) September 15, 2016

7Evernote

Our important information tends to be scattered across many devices and platforms. Meeting notes in Word documents, images in random computer folders, articles bookmarked in your browser, voice recordings of podcast ideas saved to your iPhone.

Trying to find the knowledge you need can be a huge hassle. Evernote allows you to save everything in one place that’s instantly accessible from all your devices and is highly searchable.

Every time you add a web clipping, image, video, etc., Evernote saves it as a new “note” which you can organize into “notebooks” or search for as needed. Never lose a great idea again!

Some weekends look like this. And that’s ��.

⏰ Set alarm

�� Ignore & sleep in

�� Think about making a green smoothie

�� Eat pancakes instead

���� Think about going to the gym

⭕️ Go to @Target instead

�� Make plans to go out

�� Cancel & order takeout

�� Watch @netflix until ��

— Evernote (@evernote) November 25, 2017

What’s your favorite productivity app for saving time and boosting efficiency?

How to Turn Your New Year’s Resolutions Into Habits

So you’ve decided to write more. That’s your goal, your resolution.

You’re there; the keyboard is there. Maybe in your head you’re repeating “you can do it, you can do it,” getting pumped for the outpouring of productivity, the astronomical wordcount that will no doubt ensue at any moment now.

Yep, at any second, we’re going to kick into high gear and—Hang on, let’s put on some coffee first. And while that’s warming up, we might as well start a load of laundry. Oops, we’ll get back to the keyboard in one second, and we’ll really rip into this writing thing as soon as—Actually, I just got some email, I should check this…

Getting into the discipline of writing isn’t easy. Even people who do it for a living sometimes dread it, and often procrastinate. But if writing is what calls to you, we’ve put together some thoughts on how to cement it as a new habit.

Read a lot

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others; read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

Stephen King, the author of On Writing as well as dozens of novels, urges writers to constantly have a book on hand. (He’s also far from the only wordsmith to lay into the distraction of television. The late David Foster Wallace counselled writers not to mistake watching shows for observing actual humans in the wild: “The dots are coming out of our furniture, all we’re spying on is our own furniture,” Wallace wrote.)

In the smartphone era, doing away with all manner of distraction in order to lug around a three-pound book may sound like unwieldy, curmudgeonly advice. The key here is knowing it’s easier to replace an existing habit with a new one than to erase an old habit altogether.

For instance, you might wonder when you’re supposed to have the time to read more, while also hemorrhaging precious hours over the course of each week perusing mundane social media. But if you want to take King’s advice, your phone doesn’t have to be an enemy; thanks to a variety of apps, it can be a library, both for reading and for listening to audiobooks. So rather than looking at your old classmates’ depressing vacation photos, you can open a book on your phone and begin enriching yourself as a reader.

And reading, King continues, can inform how you write, even if what you’re reading this week happens to be dreck:

I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

In other words, while you may want to write brilliantly, you’re under no obligation to choose strictly brilliant books to read.

Write a lot

If you were to take up running for the first time (as Haruki Murakami did when he first became a novelist), you probably wouldn’t expect to finish a marathon your first day, or even in your first month.

The work of writing is similar. It’s easy to forget, when you’re reading neatly assembled words on a page or a screen, that a human sat somewhere and labored to organize each thought. Writer Harlan Ellison used to remind people of this fact by demonstrating it in public; he would sit in bookstore windows and mash out page after page. “By doing it in public, I show people it’s a job,” he said, “like being a plumber or an electrician.”

Some people set out a goal of drafting their entire book in one month, but it’s a tall ask. King’s goal for himself is about two thousand words daily, including holidays; he suggests neophytes start by aiming for a thousand daily, six days a week.

Specifically, he recommends you find a room with a door on it, close that door, and stay there until you hit your goal. But in an era when people publish novels composed entirely via mobile phone and articles drafted using speech recognition while walking around New York, you’re not necessarily confined to King’s strict regimen of solitude and dad-rock. (The dude loves AC/DC.)

Indeed, no matter how you write or who you are, “writing is hard for every last one of us” as author Cheryl Strayed noted in her seminal pep talk on the subject, continuing: “Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.

You’ve got this

If this all sounds daunting, take heart; journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has called the very task of writing “an act of physical courage.”

Much of writing can be a battle with an inner editor—a voice reading each word as you write it, declaring “no, that’s not good enough. Rework this. Strike all of that. Do it better.” Managing to shut this voice up is no small feat, but doing so is crucial, explains Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, among others.

Calling perfectionism “the voice of the oppressor,” she argues that perfect can be the enemy of the good, or perhaps the hey-at-least-it’s-finally-done first draft, continuing:

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we’re supposed to be writing.

Lamott also warns that while writing is essential, “publication is not all that it is cracked up to be,” suggesting it’s perhaps better to see your new writing goal as its own reward than as a career path. On this point, she is echoed by King:

If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer.

As you cement your writing goals into habits, don’t forget to have fun. We believe in your victory.

Here’s Your Ultimate Sunday Night De-Stress Playlist

There’s a gentle balancing act in calibrating a mellow playlist, say for the Sunday evening before a hectic workweek.

Cue up too many happy songs and the result can feel saccharine. Too many sad ones will just leave you depressed. Jams that get you moving are fun when you’re going out, but tonight you’re staying in. Then again, you need something with a pulse: you’re not winding down for bed quite yet.

As the sun sets on your weekend and you curl up, perhaps to read or do a little writing, we’ve got you covered. Here’s our take on a relaxing Sunday night playlist.

Start with an old-timey vibe

What says “It’s okay, you’re right where you’re supposed to be” more plainly than the sun-dappled voice of Van Morrison?

Classics like “Sweet Thing” kindly refrain from jerking your attention or ensorcelling your dancing shoes, but the track’s layered strings reward attentive listening, if that’s your thing.

What follows is a meandering instrumental cut by Willie West. Instrumentals will be a recurring theme on this playlist. That’s because it’s often easier to read or write when the part of your brain that handles words isn’t also being barraged with lyrics.

The tale of Donnie & Joe Emerson is a heartening one for creative dreamers. The young Washington farm boys’ self-produced 1979 album was initially an expensive flop. But when it was rediscovered in 2008, it became critically lauded—and was eventually reprinted.

Rounding out our old-school quartet is Billy Fury:

The track’s playful bassline again stops short of forcing you to dance, but it might just put a smile on your face.

Zone out

Shifting gears, the warm samples of this Land of the Loops mix chart our path toward more electronic fare. It’s a pleasant balance of placid and wistful that leaves plenty of room for the mind to drift.

There’s just one word for this jam by English producer Forest Swords: hypnotic. Your humble blogger is frequently known to write with his phone in airplane mode and a Forest Swords record like Dagger Paths or Fjree Feather on the turntable.

Hewing still to instrumentals, we turn next to a recent collaboration by Louisiana producers Suicideyear and Outthepound. Though he’s known for working with rappers, Suicideyear’s careful blends of synth and 808 are often just right to quiet a restless mind.

We conclude our instrumental run with post-rock majesty. This Will Destroy You’s Young Mountain was recently reissued for the album’s tenth anniversary, and patiently building tracks like “Happiness: We’re All In It Together” hold up beautifully.

Transcend

The haunting voice of the late Patricia Keenan shepherds us into the final movement of our playlist. A departure from Broadcast’s noisier tunes, “Tears in the Typing Pool” is a memorable work of understated sadness.

After two decades apart, the English shoegaze outfit Slowdive reunited in 2014, and is poised to release a new album this May. The gently swelling teaser single, “Sugar for the Pill,” is the kind of song to carry you through whatever tribulations Monday might hold.

Colleen Green knows a thing or two about anxious nerves, as evidenced in tracks like “Deeper Than Love,” her arresting meditation on a fear of intimacy. That makes the conclusion to her 2015 album, I Want to Grow Up, all the more remarkable: “Whatever I Want” finds Green feeling unencumbered, just like you want on a Sunday night.

Finally, before she became the guitarist for the house band on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Marnie Stern was known for shredding.

Stern’s resplendent fingerwork is in effect on “The Things You Notice,” a lovely paean that leaves us ready to take on the workweek.

Mistake of the Month: Missing Commas

There are two types of writers in this world: those who use too many commas and those who use too few. While unnecessary commas can turn straightforward sentences into twisting labyrinths of syntactical confusion, missing a critical comma can change the entire meaning of your sentence.

Consider the headline from the now-infamous Rachael Ray cover of Tails magazine: “Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.” While the line breaks of the original cover make it apparent what the editors meant to say, the lack of commas between the three items in the list—“cooking,” “family,” and “her dog”—caused Tails to accidentally portray Ray as a cannibal who gleefully cooks her family and dog. Wonder if she uses EVOO for that, too?

Here are some places in your writing where you should include commas:

1. After an introductory element. When complex sentences begin with a phrase or clause, a comma is required to separate the introductory element and the independent clause. The previous sentence demonstrates this rule, but let’s look at some more examples:

• Without a care in the world, Mildred raced down the hill on her brand-new velocipede.
• In an attempt to fix the TV, he smacked the side of the set.
• To her, Paris would always be the most magical city in the world.

Note that with shorter introductory elements—generally those consisting of four or fewer words—you can technically skip the comma. However, it’s never wrong to use a comma in this instance, and eschewing it can lead to confusion.

2. Around a nonrestrictive or nonessential element. Nonrestrictive elements provide added information, but without them the sentence would still make sense. For example, “My wife, Karen, bakes the best peach cobbler.” Presumably the speaker has only one wife, so telling us her name is a helpful but nonessential aside. This piece from the New York Times has more on the difference between essential and nonessential elements, but here are a couple of additional examples:

• My best friend, Jimmy Brown, always brings an extra pudding cup for me. (People can only have one best friend at a time, so his name is a nonessential element.)
• I played the game Settlers of Catan for six hours this weekend with my friend Parvati. (Here, neither Settlers of Catan nor Parvati should be set off with commas because there are more games and friends in the world other than the two mentioned in the sentence.)

That and which indicate essential and nonessential elements, respectively. When you use that, don’t use a comma, as in “The ants that have infested my kitchen show no signs of leaving.” In this example, we need to know which specific ants the speaker is talking about. However, in the sentence “Ants, which have infested my kitchen, are my least favorite insect,” the aside set off by commas is interesting, yet taking it out doesn’t change the core meaning of the sentence.

3. After the next-to-last item in a list. Among English enthusiasts, the Oxford (or serial) comma is one of the most frequently debated topics. (Ironically, British English doesn’t tend to use the Oxford comma as frequently as American English.) When you have three or more items in a list, you have the option to use a comma between the next-to-last and last items in that list. This can sometimes clarify potential confusion or downright awkward misunderstandings. Mental Floss has a collection of pro and con examples, so take a look and decide for yourself which one you want to use.

The important thing is to be consistent; while both styles are technically correct, switching between the two in the same piece of writing is a faux pas everyone can agree on.

Are you for or against the Oxford comma? Leave a comment below!

Mistaking a dangling participle, laughter was heard anyway.

If the title of this post doesn’t make any sense, it shouldn’t.

This is going somewhere, I promise! Bear with me.

Today, while scouring Tumblr and various forums for “The Best Picture on the Internet,” I came across the following:

I am certain that most people read to the last frame and, caught up in Johnny Carson’s joke, didn’t think twice about whether or not Dean Martin knew what a dangling participle is. Those who did think about it might assume (wrongly) that a dangling participle is when someone confuses ‘can’ and ‘may.’  A very small group of readers may have gotten so hung up on Mr. Martin’s lack of grammar knowledge that they completely missed Carson’s joke. If you are part of this last group, pat yourself on the back and relax, you probably already know what this post is about. For the rest of the world, read on.

Dean Martin doesn’t really know his grammar. 

While Dean was spot on with his correction of Carson’s question, “Can I?”, he should have stopped there. A dangling participle is neither the confusion of ‘can’ and ‘may’ nor is it something that you can cover with a long coat.

So, what is a dangling participle?

It’s really not as painful as it sounds.

Simply, a dangling participle is an adjective ending in -ing (present participle) that does not correspond logically to a noun in the sentence.

For clarity’s sake, let’s have a look at a couple sentences and identify the parts:

Julie walked excitedly to the diving board.  

(“Diving” is the present participle. It is an adjective ending in -ing that is modifying a clear noun, “board.”)

Walking around the pool, Julie heard someone call her name.

(“Walking” is the present participle. “Walking around the pool” is the participial phrase modifying the noun, “Julie”.  That Julie is the one “walking around the pool” makes logical sense. The participle here is not dangling. This is a correct sentence.)

Walking around the pool, a voice called her name.

(Again, “walking” is the present participle, and “walking around the pool” is the participial phrase modifying the subject. However, here the noun “voice” does not make sense. The “voice” is not the one “walking around the pool.” Since it is not clear who or what is “walking,” the participle is left “dangling.”)

Here are more examples of dangling participles:

Incorrect: Turning around quickly, the ground was wet.

(The participial phrase “turning around quickly” does not make sense modifying the noun “ground.”)

Correct: Turning around quickly, Julie slipped on the wet ground.

(The participial phrase “turning around quickly” makes sense modifying the noun “Julie,” who was “turning.”)

Incorrect: Falling into the pool, the splash attracted a lot of attention.

(It doesn’t make sense for the noun “splash” to be “falling into the pool.”)

Correct: Falling into the pool, Julie made a huge splash.

(Again, setting “Julie” as the noun being modified is more clear and logical.)

Fixing dangling participles

When you have a dangling participle in your writing, it’s likely that the intended and correct noun was used as the subject of the previous sentence or is “understood” by context.  However, when the noun following a participial phrase does not clearly link to what is happening in the sentence, it should be changed. Reword these sentences by clearly restating who or what is being modified by the participle.

Incorrect: Julie walked excitedly toward the diving board. Moving around the pool, a voice called her name.

Correct: Julie walked excitedly toward the diving board. Moving around the pool, she heard a voice call her name.

So, as you see, dangling modifiers don’t have anything to do with ‘can’ and ‘may,’ and Dean Martin didn’t really know anything about grammar. No one is perfect. Luckily, Johnny Carson did know a thing or two about comedy, and we all benefited from the gaffe.

Test your skills:

How would you correct the title of this post?

A Lot vs. Alot vs. Allot

A lot, alot, and allot only differ by a few spaces or letters. However, all of the terms function differently. Let’s investigate how to use each one.

What Does a Lot Mean?

Alot is a common misspelling of a lot. A lot should always be spelled as two words. The meaning of a lot depends on the context. Usually, it means “many” or “to a great extent.” Let’s look at some examples.

Shelley reads a lot of books during her morning commute.

Chopped parsley looks alot like chopped cilantro.

What Does Allot Mean?

To allot means to apportion by shares or to set aside for a special purpose. How do you use this verb? Let’s look at some examples of allot in a sentence.

The settlers were alloted one acre of farmland.

The employer allots one hour for lunch.

Examples

America is “closer than a lot of folks think” to ending cancer, Barack Obama has revealed.

Independent

Maybe everybody had the same allotedmeasure of happiness within each day.

Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants