The 24 Best Productivity Apps in 2022
I’ve refined my collection of ‘best productivity apps’ over many, many years. I’ve kept all the good apps, and deleted any that weren’t efficient, or easy to work with.
I used most of these apps in my old life as a medical student and junior doctor, to help me study and create videos on the side. Now, I use them to run multiple businesses and grow a 3M-subscriber YouTube channel.
OK, let’s get started.
🖐️ My Five Categories
Broadly speaking, I have five categories for my productivity apps, based on what I use them for:
Coordinate – to coordinate my schedule, to-do’s, and keep track of documents.
Communicate – for chatting with friends, and communicating productively with my team.
Consume – for reading, listening to podcasts, and soaking up knowledge.
Capture – for note-taking, highlighting, and retaining useful bits of information from the things I consume.
Create – where the magic happens, the apps I use to draft + create my own original content.
🧠 Coordinate
You need three main things in the Coordinate department. A calendar to manage your schedule, a task management system to track to-do’s, and a file management system for all your documents. The best productivity apps
📆 1. Fantastical
Usefulness Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Price: $3.33/month
Fantastical is the calendar app I’ve used for the last five years. It’s absolutely sick. Although it’s Mac only, it can connect to Google, iCloud and Outlook calendars. So all of your events are in one place.
And it looks really pretty.
One of the things I like most about Fantastical is its natural language processing. For example, here’s how I create a new calendar event. I just type ‘15th of April 3-5pm, meeting with Taimur at Nandos’. And Fantastical will add that to my calendar with all the relevant information. Which is super handy.
The way I run my life, unless something is in my calendar it basically doesn’t exist. I never have to worry or wonder about what I’m doing next. It’s all there on the calendar.
📂 2. Google Drive
Usefulness Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Price: 15GB free, 100GB $1.99/month, 2TB $9.99/month
Although I’m an Apple fanboy, I don’t use iCloud for file management. I’m Google Drive all the way, and have been for the last 10 years. It’s simple, uber-reliable, and does the job.
I have a personal Google Drive account (2TB storage) for my own photos and documents. And for business stuff, we use Google Workspace, which has unlimited storage – we’ve used 20.3 terabytes of Google Drive storage as a team so far.
It’s pretty insane that you get that much storage as part of the business plan.
✅ 3. Todoist
Usefulness Score: ⭐⭐
Price: Free, or $5/month for premium
Todoist is my productivity app of choice for task management. It’s simple, cheap (there’s a free version), and works on any platform (Windows, iPhone, Android, etc). You can organise your to-dos any way you want, with due dates, reminders, and sub-tasks for bigger projects.
I use the sharing features to delegate tasks to my executive assistant. So I just create a project called ‘Dan’, and put tasks in there that I’d like him to sort out. Todoist is also where I track my bucket list: rollerblading, archery, hunting, glamping, mountain biking, wakeboarding… and so on.
🧠 4. Notion
Usefulness Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Price: Free, $5/month premium
Notion is the main app I use for producing YouTube videos, planning my Deep Dive podcast, running the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, and getting stuff done in my business.
My favourite thing about Notion is how easy it is to customise workflows. Kanban boards, video embeds, smart spreadsheets, and way more.
There are a ton of features. But the key to using Notion is to start off with a very simple system, and build it up over time.
It’s a super-clean and minimalist app by default, but I like to give my pages some character, with emojis and images. Notion also has a massive online community creating free & paid templates (check out my free video YouTube creator templates).