The first official working week of the new year has almost come to end and its shown the majority of us that we need to do some exercise — no, not the gym type, but exercising our concentration skills.
Whether it’s working through the inbox or scheduling all those catch-up meetings you postponed in December, ticking off the daily to-do list feels like a feat in itself.
To the rescue come these smart apps and handy gadgets, to give you an efficient boost that will last well into the new year and beyond.
Meeting maker
Office workers spend about 10 per cent of the time scheduling and co-ordinating meetings — could there be a more boring statistic? A new app from London-based entrepreneur Andreas Adamides, CatchApp (free, catchapp.mobi) aims to be the ultimate meeting scheduler so you can focus on the things that actually interest you.
“Successful meetings are what helps drive successful business. Getting those meetings organised and scheduled in the diary should not be the most stressful, difficult and time-consuming part of the process,” he says.
Like an office-friendly Doodle poll, the meeting organiser proposes timing options and recipients choose which ones work best. Once a best time is selected, the meeting is automatically added to everyone’s calendars, whether they’re using Gmail, Apple or Outlook. Apple recently selected CatchApp as its app of the day.
Don’t misplace any notes you make too with the Post-It app (free, post-it.com). Scribble musings down on paper and then snap it in the app, making it easier to collaborate with other team members on thoughts and ideas. Trello integration means you can add up to 200 notes at a time to a Trello board to bring those visions to life.
Smart focus
Big presentation ahead but your hand is straying to scroll through Instagram? The Forest app (£1.99, forestapp.cc) will stop that. Plant a tree in the app as a signal you’re going to start concentrating and the tree will start to grow. If you flick off the tree will die, but if you finish your task without distractions it will grow and become part of the forest.
You can also earn virtual coins that can be spent on planting real trees — over 600,000 have been planted so far.
Productive products
According to a Cambridge University study, every fifth word you type contains a typo — who wants to work out how much time they waste correcting mistakes? David Eberle, the founder of Typewise, thinks it’s not our terrible spelling to blame but the design of the QWERTY keyboard, more suited to typewriters than smartphones.
His keyboard app (free, typewise.app) has redesigned the system we’ve been using for 140 years to a more modern version that reduces typos by 80 per cent thanks to a hexagonal key design, easier for our round fingerprints to tackle. The app even includes an assistant to help you get used to the new design and soon you’ll be whizzing off accurate emails.
This week’s CES gadget show in Las Vegas also shed a light on futuristic products to improve your day-to-day work. HP’s new Elite Dragonfly laptop (price TBA, hp.com) is one of the first computers to feature a 5G antenna to facilitate connections to super-fast speeds on the go, with a built-in Tile tracker. Now that's smart working.
