6 Apps for Taking a Bit of the Work Out of Your Workday

Managing your tasks shouldn’t be a distraction unto itself. These desk mates let your phone handle the hard stuff.

Pocket

Pocket archives web articles, news stories, and online documents into a personal library so you can read them later in the app’s distraction-free interface. Use it to collect industry headlines, then sync them to your phone for offline reading on the train or the bus.
$5 per month

Freedom

Every app on your home screen is a potential distraction. But Freedom lets you block specific apps—or the entire internet—for a set amount of time. You can schedule your outages in advance or on the fly. And if need be, you can end a session early.
$7 per month

Buffer

If social media is a time suck, try automating it. Schedule your posts for the day in Buffer, then close Instagram and get back to work or family. The app handles all the major social media platforms and gives you reports on what your followers clicked on.
Free

Google Assistant

Siri is fine for queuing up songs, but Google’s voice assistant gives your iPhone a bigger productivity boost. The AI-powered helper can schedule meetings, set reminders, and take dictation for email and texts. It’ll even tell you when to leave for the airport.
Free

Actions

From the people who brought you the iconic Moleskine notebooks, this new app keeps track of tasks, appointments, and reminders. Organize lists as obsessively as you want with custom color coding, and set reminders liberally if you need nudging.
$12 per year

Airmail

This app for iOS devices streamlines your cluttered inbox with a hyper-personalized approach. You can tag messages with labels and colors of your choosing and customize swipe gestures to trigger specific actions. And yes, it has Undo Send too. $5

This article appears in the March issue. Subscribe now.