[note background=”#F0F0F0″]This is a guest post by Anna Fox. She is the writer addicted to self-improvement. She is devoted to her searching for new ways to increase productivity. You can follow her on Twitter or Google+[/note]
When it comes to blogging, time is always a factor. Whether you write on the web casually or for business purposes, time saving is a critical component.
That makes anything that can save you time a valuable addition to your toolkit, whether it's making the writing process itself easier, or helping you to shave time when you're attending to the technical needs of your website. Freeing up more of your time means being better able to choose how you want to spend each valuable hour that you dedicate to blogging.
Interested in sparing yourself some of your lengthy workload in exchange for more flexible time that allows you to do what you do best? Here are five time-saving apps for bloggers to increase productivity:
1. Pixlr
Every blogger knows that including an image in a blog post is a must when to comes to holding the all-too-often short attention spans of your readers, but of course this is a minor part of what you do when you publish a new piece. It's the hundreds or even thousands of words that you wrote that really matter!
In order to balance these responsibilities appropriately, consider foregoing the complication and headache of a massive graphical editing program like Photoshop for something small, sweet, and to the point: Pixlr.
This absolutely free tool is available via any web browser. It allows you to edit photos and graphics in mere moments and helping you to avoid bulky apps that do more than you need them to. Simply load Pixlr in a new tab, crop, resize, and commit other changes, then save your finished file locally – that's it!
2. Dropbox
The word "cloud" may just be the hottest new keyword around the web in 2013, and with good reason: online file storage and sharing helps to take much of the pain out of many aspects of working online, blogging included.
Store your files in the cloud in order to access them from anywhere any at any time. You can share files with clients and colleagues, and generally keep your desktop free of clutter and distraction. DropBox will help you to achieve all of that and more, and at no cost for a more than reasonable amount of storage space.
3. 30/30 Task Manager
If you're serious about being more productive in your blogging activities, then managing tasks and planning your short-term goals is a must. You'll not likely find a better tool to help you achieve this than the 30/30 Task Manager.
This nifty app, available for all Apple devices, not only allows you to create to-do lists, but even set time limits for each of them. This will help you to plan each and every minute of your work time in order to get the very most out of it.
Besides traditional lists and timers, this app also boasts the ability to highly customize things with labels and icons. It also provides notification options to allow your mobile device to give you a heads up when it's time to get something done. Throw in iCloud syncing, and you've got the perfect tool to help you make the most of every minute at your desk – and on the road!
4. Memonic
No matter what niche you occupy, research very likely plays a key role when constructing new content for your blog, and that can often prove to be a time-consuming task. Research requires jumbles of notes and copious amounts of more or less idle time spent alone.
Thankfully, Memonic helps you to keep your research and note-taking neat and tidy, making it easier to extract the information that you need to write beautiful, engaging, and well-informed content.
Available for PC and all major mobile platforms, Memonic allows you to clip images and text from the web, add notes. With this, you can organize your research in a way that suits you best, whether you're at your desk or on the go.
5. Coffitivity
Alright, this one may be a bit of a stretch, but consider this: some studies suggest that ambient background noise can actually boost your productivity in a given work session. With that tidbit in mind, consider using the very unique Coffitivity app in order to give yourself a boost when you need it most.
Available via a browser, and also for Apple mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, Coffitivity very simply plays light coffee shop noise for you to work with. That noise includes the murmuring of low voices, the light opening and closing of doors, and even the occasional coffee grinder.
Whether this serves to perk you up like the caffeine itself would, or simply makes you feel more productive for having gotten up and away from your desk – even if you haven't at all – this app offers a unique approach to boosting your work ethic. It will also allow you to have a little fun at the same time.
Question: Do you use any of these tools already? Which tool is the one productivity tool you absolutely love and why?
Please share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you kindly!
Hi Anna,
Thank you for sharing these tools with my community here. I know it takes time to write such a quality post and then share on somebody’s blog as a guest author.
You have the heart to do a great job and you have done a marvelous job here! Thank you!
Regards,
Kumar
Kumar, thanks a lot for publishing my post on your blog. You have a great site and awesome audience. It was pleasure working with you and sharing some thoughts with your readers.
Very informative post, Anna 🙂 Thank you, for valuable information I didn’t know!
Hi Aistis,
Being in a different time zone, Anna will respond to you when she comes around 🙂
Happy Halloween to you! Hope you are having a great time there.
Regards,
Kumar
Thanks Aistis. Glad to hear that my post became of value to you. That's very inspiring
Happy Halloween to you guys!
Hi Anna,
Great post here at Kumar’s blog and thank you for sharing this list with us.
I’ve used Pixlr but then I won a program called SnagIt so I’ve been using that instead. I’m not a big graphics person so I really need simple.
I’m still not a big cloud person either but I don’t need to save a lot of stuff that way or pass it around but maybe whenever I get to that point I will.
I currently write my goals and tasks in a notebook I keep on my desk. There are some things that I prefer to do the old school way I suppose but I’m probably about the only left that does it that way.
I’m definitely going to check out Memonic because what I do now is I just save the links in a text file and write some notes around those for future posts. I use to do it on Evernote but it got too cluttered because it would add up. I think I’ll give this one a test drive.
Coffitivity would benefit me either because I really can’t concentrate on what I’m doing if there is anyone talking while I’m working or music playing. I definitely can’t work in a coffee shop environment but man I’m so surprised by the number of people who do. I so admire them.
Thanks though for this list and I will be trying at least one of them. Better than none right.
Hope you both are enjoying your day and Happy Halloween.
~Adrienne
Adrienne, thank you for sharing your experience with us. Organizing your working process is such an individual case. So some tips and apps which are perfect for majority of bloggers are not always good for you. Personally I try to test everything I find to choose the best tools for me. The more I try -> the more possibilities for time saving I find -> the more productive I become.
Thanks and Happy Halloween to you too!
Hey Anna,
This was a nice write up on time saving apps. i actually use Dropbox and been using it for a couple of years. If I have to describe it in one word, I have to use “Convenience”…. anyways there’s internet access, I can get into my dropbox in order to do some work (specifically blogging).
Now Coffitivity piqued my interest. I would never guess having background noise will improve productivity. Whenever I go to the coffee shops I try to most quiet place in order to do work. But I guess the background noise would be equivalent to listening to classical music which suppose to help improve study habits.
But one thing I really want to check out is Pixlr. Photoshop is a bit time consuming and over the top for me right now. I need something simple that will help me edit any photos I use whether it be for a header or even just on my regular blog posts.
Thanks for sharing!
Sherman, you are absolutely right! Dropbox is one of my favourite tools. Sometimes I think: “how were we living without it before”
Hello Anna,
Welcome to Kumar’s blog!
Thank you for sharing this list of apps with us. Out of all of them, I’m only using Dropbox. I do have other apps such as WordPress and Cozi for managing all the different schedules. I love anything that will make my life easier so I will definitely be checking out these that you shared with us.
Pixlr and Memonic are the ones that caught my eye for sure :). Happy Friday Kumar and Anna, it was very nice to meet you!
Hi Corina,
It’s great to hear from you. I’m glad that you enjoyed the post and thank you for your words of appreciation for Anna.
Have a wonderful weekend ahead!
Regards,
Kumar
Corina, thanks for such a hearty welcome! Pixlr and Memonic are splendid tools essential for our busy lives. So I’m sure you’ll love both of them. I just want to ask you to share your opinion with us about these apps after your “test drive”. It would be great to hear again from you.
Happy weekend!
Hi Kumar,
Wow, I don’t know half of those apps, but they all seem very interesting.
Yes, indeed, as strange as it may seem, the brain creates better in a slightly noisy environment. I remember that I used to write my articles in a busy café few years ago and that worked perfect for me. I would start writing like in some kind of trance like I’ve never attained when am at home in a quiet room.
Thank you for sharing those tools. I will definitely check them out.
Sylviane, glad to meet the person who has already tested busy café sounds and admitted their positive influence on productivity. Most of my followers have a lot of suspicions about the effectiveness of this tool. But now I have one more evidence to prove consistency of this theory. Thank you for letting us know about your experience.
Hi Kumar, I use dropbox, it’s great for collaboration and for outsourcers. For all the other tools reviewed here, I’m using something different, but probably similar. I use paint.net for image editing. I use “remember the milk” for organizing and managing my tasks. For research, I’ve been using Word or Excel but they are not good managers of notes etc.
Hi, Julieanne. Totally agree with you about Excel and Word. For solution of our blogging tasks they not good at all. Maybe you should try Memonic. In any case testing of a new tool could be very informative and fun at the same time.
Great Tools. thanks for listing the top useful apps. Thank You Anna. I was not aware of the last three apps, but I will surely download it and increase my productivity.
Thanks, Jijin. Hope you’ll like them
Truthfully, Pixlr is very limiting, even for anyone new to graphic design. You are better off downloading ad using GIMP, or buying a copy from ebay of Photoshop or Corel.
One of the big things about Pixlr is that it kind of freezes up if you use it to do screenshots of other places and you sometimes have to keep allowing it to run as I’ve noticed on some computers, it won’t save the cookie to keep allowing you to run certain Pixlr settings like screenshot taking.
Nile, you are right. Photoshop and Gimp are incontestable leaders in postprocessing with awesome variety of functions for professional photo-editing. They are essential for more delicate image changes. As amateur photographer I use Photoshop to add some gloss to my pictures. And Pixlr doesn’t have any abilities to compete with them. It was developed for solving other tasks. First of all it’s online tool. I can use it on the go even from my Iphone. It is perfect for simple image correction. And easy screenshots making option (as you’ve mentioned) – it is perfect. Photoshop and Pixlr could exist together. Both of them have their own advantages.
Hi Anna & Kumar !
This is a wonderful list of applications ! I have only used dropbox for storing backups of my wordpress blog and some PDF documents . If required , i’ll use the task management app that you’ve mentioned in this list .Thanks for sharing the list with us .
-Pramod
Thanks, Pramod. I’m happy to share useful stuff. I’m sure 30/30 Task Manager will be helpful for increasing your blogging productivity.
I am always looking to be more effective and efficient with the limited time that I have each day between work, school, and life. I will check these out, but what about Evernote, or old fashioned sticky-notes on the desktop?
They are so sweet 🙂 sometimes I long for that multicoloured sticky-notes. They call up memories of my first days in blogging. But I’m afraid they are no more effective when you need multitasking. With the rise of software development we move away from old paper work.
Interesting list of productive apps. I am curious with coffitivity, there are times when working from home is just too quiet that I would turn on the radio but the music would just be too distracting for work. Maybe a soft murmur in the background is just what I need. Thank you!
Cherrie, as you have such a problem coffitivity could be just what you need. Hope it will boost your productivity level. Good luck!
About the dropbox, is that supporting for text sharing? I want to text some article on my smartphone and then share it with my laptop (i’m tired to sit for hours in front of my laptop just for writing article). If they do, maybe i should try that tool
Septiyan, if you are using the same Dropbox account both on your smartphone and on your laptop then your text document saved on smartphone and put in the dropbox folder will be seen on your laptop
Fab list of tools Anna. I use more these days to make my life easier.
Thanks!
Ryan
Thanks Ryan. You are absolutely right. Incorporating these handy tools in our working routine are helping us to finish all our tasks faster and with less “power input”
Previously I knew only Dropbox and pixler, thanks for sharing others, however some of them may not be available for PC, I’ll try some.
Hi Kamran. I’m so glad to share with you some new and handy information. 30/30 Task Manager is available for Apple devices. But I’m sure there are similar apps for PC
Good post!
In today’s world it is very easy to get overwhelmed and that’s why it is super important to organize your work environment the right way. Many people try to do it by multitasking but they don’t know that is is actually a strategy that do not work!
You are right about importance of working space organization. It is nearly the easiest way to increase productivity without any delays. But talking about multitasking is a matter of opinion. I have several friends who are well-known bloggers and internet marketers and I should say that they are real experts in multitasking.
Anna, the sounds of blogging you shared seems to me informative. I am using these apps in my smart phone and tab specially Pixlr, Dropbox and Coffitivity. From my experience and views i appreciate you for those time-saving apps for bloggers to increase productivity. Thanks!
Grinders, that’s great. I’m glad to hear that some apps from the list have already gained love and recognition.
Hi Anna Fox,
What an informative post for saving times and increasing productivity! I use pixlr and dropbox most of time. But I have found here one interesting tool named as coffitivity. I may try it now
Best Regards
Munna
Currently, I only use DropBox only. Thank you Anna, has provided additional information for which I was studying blogging.
first of all i’d like to appreciate you and also i want to thank you for providing such an amazing and helpful apps list here, i like this post and i am using some of the above apps like pixlr. thank you