The easiest way to increase your productivity starts with outsourcing menial work – all the repetitive, low-value tasks in your workflow that get in the way of what you were hired to do. As technology advances, there are now tons of apps that can take on annoying, time-consuming jobs. They either reduce the time you spend on them (by making them easier to manage), or use automation and AI to outsource the pain completely.
But which apps are actually worth your attention? To shorten your search, here’s our definitive list of all the unproductive tasks everyone should outsource, and the best apps for the job.
Time Management
Timely – automatically tracks your day across web, desktop and mobile to create time sheets for you. Essential if you want to know exactly how you spend your time without wasting it in the process.
MyLifeOrganized – automatically creates to-do lists, arranging tasks in order of important and tracking your progress. Helps you stay prepared if you find yourself getting overwhelmed with tasks.
Workflow – mix and match over 200 actions to create shortcuts on your home screen, simplifying and shortening many daily tasks.
Email organization
Front – makes managing shared company inboxes a breeze. Anyone with access to the inbox can answer emails or assign them to others, and you can also connect them to social media accounts.
Airmail – one of the most powerful email management apps around: it helps you write quick emails, with smart templates for your most-used replies, and syncs with many of the best productivity apps too.
SaneBox – uses AI to streamline your inbox, ranking messages by their importance and then filtering out the low-priority ones that don't require immediate attention.
Meeting management
Dewo – uses AI to schedule meetings with minimal impact on everyone's space for undisturbed deep thinking. It intelligently reschedules disruptive meetings and automates scheduling back and forth too.
Meetin.gs – lets you create a personal page where people can see your available time slots and request a meeting. It also helps you hold more effective meetings by creating agendas for you.
Zoom.AI – Sifts through all your docs, files and CRM systems and collates all the necessary info for your evaluation so you can cut down on pre-meeting time drains.
Accounting
QuickBooks – helps you stay on top of expenses. It manages invoices, sends emails estimates, collates important financial statements, and can even pay both team members and clients.
Sage Accounting – ideal if you work with freelancers or contractors, but also makes recording income/expenses and performing bank reconciliation simple.
Project management
Doddle – helps project managers run multiple projects, manage personnel and balance resources. Its collaboration capabilities make working together and assigning resources a…doddle?
Trello – breaks down the colossal task of project management, allowing you to create different workflows, schedule jobs, organize tasks, communicate and share docs with a little help from automation.
Wrike – streamlines project management, making it simple to schedule and allocate jobs, create different project dashboards and documents, and share pictures, videos and stats.
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Payroll
SurePayroll – a huge step towards automating your payroll. It helps you pay your staff, make the correct tax subtractions and ensure invoices are paid on time.
Gusto – combines payroll, benefits admin, HR and compliance purposes in one simple package, making it easier than ever before for you to manage your team’s main HR requirements.
Social media
Hootsuite – Acts as your single social media control center. Manage three different social accounts, schedule up to 30 posts in advance, and generate leads with social contests.
Buffer – the best choice for cross-platform posting. Schedule posts across multiple social platforms to gain maximum exposure for each and review its helpful analytic insights to quickly see well each post performed.
Reporting
Sisense – helps you quickly turn detailed data into tangible business insights. Automate manual reporting tasks, share interactive dashboards, and create reports.
Adaptive Insights – lets you to create reports, dashboards and scorecards, and then easily share them across your workforce. You can also track KPIs with interactive dashboards.
Team collaboration
Wimi – creates its own ‘unified workspaces’ where teams can work on different projects, share calendars and files, organize teams and ensure everything you need is in one place.
Monday – is a team collaboration app that helps you communicate, set goals and allocate tasks. Its simple yet attractive visual design makes it super easy to work with.
Hiring
SmartRecruiters – lets you rate and review candidates, collaborate with your hiring team, examine analytics on your jobs, change the status of each candidate and make offers from one place.
Greenhouse and Workable offer a similar package – it’s not quite outsourcing, but it makes coordination around the hiring process so much easier.
