How to be productive at work

The crowdsourcing style app allows you to query your social network contacts, and lend them a helping hand when they're in need of an answer. Jelly doesn’t rely on just text-based questions, but it actually allows users to use pictures to probe their questions.

Let’s say, for example, you see someone in a magazine sporting a jacket you really like. Simply take a picture of the jacket, and post it alongside a question like: “Does anyone know who makes this jacket, or where I can find one like it?”

While Jelly is still in its early stages, the potential for marketing incorporation appears to be promising. Customer service, product marketing, and crowdsourcing are among a handful of other ways that early adopters are making use of the Jelly app from a business standpoint.

You just stumbled upon a awesome article on how to increase your conversion rates, but your next meeting starts in 2 minutes. No worries, just put it in your pocket.

While the average pocket commonly serves as a home for a piece of lint, 25 cents, and a rogue paperclip, the Pocket app serves as a place to store more valuable items, like that article on conversion rates you just found.

Formerly known as Read It Later, Pocket is a bookmarking app that makes it easy for users to store articles and videos to queue up at their convenience. The read-later experience doesn't rely on an internet connection, so you can revisit your findings pretty much anywhere. Sounds like a great way to increase your productivity on lengthy plane, train, or automobile rides, huh?

Best of all, Pocket will sync across all of your devices, providing users with a hassle-free way to resume reading on their preferred device.

Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street, what do all of these box office hits have in common? Scorsese.

Behind every great video production is a talented director, and the Directr for Business app is aiming to be just that.

While 71% of consumers feel positively about brands that publish videos, 85% of consumers are more likely to buy after viewing product videos (Source: Inbound Marketing Agents). If bandwidth is holding your business back from producing quality video content, Directr for Business has an entire library of production templates to make it easy for just about anyone to execute.

The templates are divided into categories that range anywhere from product announcement, to how-to tutorials, to company culture insight. Each template contains a storyboard style shot list that lays out how to approach each shot -- for example the first shot in a "how-to" video prompts users to answer the question "who are you and what are you teaching?"

Aside from a prompt, each shot comes complete with directors notes, and visual suggestions that explain how to position the shot. They've pretty much covered it all, all that's left for you to do is look pretty and nail your dialogue.

Directr for Business offers a free account which will give you access to 1 movie a month, and partial storyboard library access (4 different templates to be exact) as well as two different paid versions of the app, Basic ($24.99/month) and Premium ($49.99/month).

I don't like to think of Any.do as an app, but rather a morning ritual.

The first stop in any Monday morning grind should be this user-friendly planning tool. On paper, Any.do can best be referred to as a to do list application designed to help you plan out your busy day, but it's really more than that.

Any.do helps you manage your life, both professional and personal, by inputting tasks into it's sleek and simple interface. Users have the option to schedule tasks into 4 categories, (Today, Tomorrow, Upcoming, and Someday) making it fun to plan tomorrow's blog post and someday's vacation. Tasks can be sorted into different folders to optimize organization, and notes and contacts can be added for added clarification.

Additionally, Any.Do is highly integrated with the calendar application, Cal. So much so that one might say they're "going steady." You can even sign into Cal using your Any.Do account, and all of your tasks will carry over into its interactive internal calendar. Adding events to the calendar is simple, and it even gives you the option to enter a location name so that Cal can map out a route for you.

Any.Do Moment and Cal provides busy marketers with a lens through which they can focus their tasks and interactions.

Asana is a task management tool that makes collaboration on team projects easier than ever.

Created by Facebook co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, Asana is a free* application that provides real-time interaction through a user-friendly interface. Asana users can create tasks, assign them to team members, set due dates, add notes, attach files, create internal checklists, and communicate with others through comments. Once tasks are created, you can group them into projects, and invite team members so that they can brainstorm, assign subtasks, and work toward accomplishing their goals.

The thing that makes Asana the perfect tool for marketers is its ability to present conversations and projects side-by-side, eliminating the hassle of scattered emails and missed messages. No more digging through your inbox to find that file John sent you, and that set of images Bobby wrapped up last week. Asana keeps everything you need neatly in one place.

(*Asana offers a free version of the tool for up to 15 users. Beyond 15 users, Asana offers several different variations for paid plans. Their pricing ranges from $50/month - $800/month)

Pronounced like gift without the ‘G’, IFTTT is a innovative new app that stands for "if this than that."

IFTTT provides users with a tool to mix up custom "recipes" that trigger a particular action. Sound confusing? It's not.

The average IFTTT recipe contains the following elements:

1.Channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Evernote, iOS photos, Weather, Dropbox, Email, Feedly, iOS Reminders, LinkedIn and 70 more.
2.Triggers: "I upload a photo to Instagram", "I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook", "I set an iOS reminder"
3.Actions: "Send me a text message", "Add it to my Dropbox", "Post to Facebook"
Let's say you want to keep your branding consistent across the board, and you want your Twitter avatar to match your Facebook profile photo. Simply use this "recipe":

If my Facebook profile pictures changes, then update my Twitter profile picture.

A lot of the time when I am working on a "how-to" blog post I reference screenshots from my phone. Oh, you do too? Use this recipe:

If I take a screenshot on iOS, then save it to my Evernote notebook.

With seemingly endless combinations, IFTTT provides busy marketers with a way to automate simple tasks that save a lot of time.

Life Graphy presents users with a totally unique approach to the average productivity app concept.

The colorful app breaks your tasks down into mini pie charts that can contain up to ten segments (1 segment per task). As you complete tasks, the individual sections within the chart begin to fill up. A completed circle is something to smile about.

Life Graphy offers users 3 views: Day, Month, and Year. By switching between the 3 views, you can get a good visual idea of how much you have accomplished.

While the functionality of the app is enough reason to try it out, it's the interface that really does it for me.

Committing to a task-based planning app is easier said than done, but Life Graphy makes you want to keep trucking along because its fun!

CARROT is the to-do list with a personality ready to both entertain and annoy you with whimsical notifications and punishment for procrastination. Pull down to add a new task and swipe right to complete one. When you complete your tasks you’ll receive points and a reward (over 400 unique rewards). Keep CARROT happy by getting things done in real life and she’ll reward you. But be careful; slackers make CARROT upset…

EasilyDo is a free app that organizes and notifies you of what matters so that you can stay on top of things; less work, less worry, and more time for you. This app cleans up and adds new contacts, checks traffic, notifies you of bad weather, tracks packages, schedules and sends birthday greetings, and many more – 41 automated tasks in total! Get alerts when it’s time to go to an event with drive time and parking, dial into conference calls and view attendees’ LinkedIn profiles, check driving and public transit times for daily commute, get directions and drive time to home or work, enter reminders on the go and much more.

For those times when you have a great idea but are in the oddest place with nothing to write it down on or with, Evernote is the answer! Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web. With Evernote, all of your notes, web clips, files and images are made available on every device and computer you use. Collect information from anywhere into a single place. From text notes to web pages to files to snapshots, everything is always at your fingertips. Share your notes and collaborate on projects with friends, colleagues and classmates. Evernote makes modern life manageable, by letting you easily collect and find everything that matters.

There are plenty of different time-tracking tools out there, but Yast is one of the best, by far. Its intuitive interface is easy to understand and simple to use, making tracking your time less of a chore and more of a business priority.

For best results, though, don’t just use this tool for business. Use it to track how much time you’re spending on unimportant tasks (e.g. goofing around online or watching TV at home) in order to “split test your life” and become more efficient overall.

The program combines a social intranet system with CRM tools that include contact tracking, sales funnel management, messaging, activity planning and calendars, all of which enable your team to quickly manage important pieces of information from within a central program.

Best of all, it’s free for teams with fewer than 12 people (subscription plans for larger groups are modestly priced as well).

I’m not sure where the word “Trello” came from, but its definition should be, “project management simplified.” Combining elements of both Pinterest and Basecamp HQ, Trello allows users to create project boards and easily manage the people and resources associated with each task.

Plus, despite its simplified, easy to use system, Trello is still free for use by teams of all sizes.

Unsurprisingly, Sanebox performs the exact task described in its name: it restores some sanity to the clutter of your inbox. Once installed, the program automatically filters newsletters and other lower-priority email messages into a “Read Later” folder, ensuring that only priority communications reach your inbox.

Currently, the program runs for $55/year (with monthly and two-year subscriptions available as well), though you can take advantage of a 50 percent discount by allowing the company to post a few messages to your Facebook Facebook account. However, even if you aren’t comfortable with this, the roughly $5/month you’ll spend to install Sanebox is more than worth the time saved sifting through unimportant email messages.

(**Pro tip: If you run the Chrome browser, use the Baydin Email Game plugin to clean out your inbox before installing Sanebox. Using the two tools together doesn’t just make “Inbox Zero” a possibility, it makes it fun to reach as well!)

If you’re working on a writing project that requires your complete focus, you need the WriteMonkey program. Once activated, the tool transforms your computer into a full-screen writing environment that blocks out the distractions of standard computer interfaces. Not only is it free to use, it’s highly customizable, allowing you to set the color schemes and options that make you as productive as possible.

It’s no secret that password management is an extremely important priority for business people – especially considering the recent hacking of Wired Magazine’s Mat Honan.

However, coming up with and remembering the hundreds of strong, secure passwords needed to manage multiple logins is inefficient and often downright impossible without a password management program like LastPass.

LastPass is a highly secure, free program that will automatically generate and store secure passwords, enabling you to create nearly un-hackable logins that are served up by the program whenever you need to login to a website. And while there are plenty of programs offering this functionality on the market today, I prefer LastPass for its mobile integrations (though you’ll need to upgrade to the $12/year premium subscription) and its range of multi-factor authentication processes (which protect your password data even more).

Finally, one area of efficiency that all organizations must consider is the amount of resources dedicated to internal communications. Holding meetings takes time, while distributing memos requires paper — and if someone important is left out of the initial communication, both time and resources are wasted getting this person up to speed.

To eliminate these issues, we use the HipChat utility at Single Grain. It’s a private chat tool that allows us to create chat rooms for groups of users, send private messages between individual teammates and even share files that pertain to ongoing discussions. At only $2/user, per month, it’s an effective way to ensure that our projects are managed as efficiently as possible.