5 Free Work from Home Apps to Increase Productivity
What are Work from Home Apps?
Work from home apps are mobile applications people can download from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store to increase productivity while working from home. From time tracking to self-improvement, employees’ work from home set-ups and practices can be improved by maximizing the use of free apps.
How Can Work from Home Apps Help Increase Productivity?
Since the recent COVID19 outbreak, working from home has become the new normal for most employees around the world. Some were forced, and others were encouraged, but the sudden need to work from home has challenged workers to adapt quickly and make the best of the resources available. Work from home apps help employees overcome the productivity hurdles that come with working off-site.
We compiled 5 of the best free mobile apps employees can use to be more productive while working from home. While some of these work-from-home apps have a premium version for removing ads and unlocking additional features, their free version still provides users with foundational functionality, including offline usability, to help you successfully work from home.
5 Free Work from Home Apps to Increase Productivity
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Best for:
- Tracking time spent on tasks
- Detecting idle time while working
- Reporting tracked time data
Being mindful of how you spend your time when working from home can help you achieve your daily work goals consistently. Toggl is a free time tracker available on desktop and mobile that lets workers start, stop, and log times and tasks with ease.
The application can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, and it comes with a calendar integration for turning events into time entries, email tracking reminders when you forget to stop the timer, and weekly reports of time tracked to help you improve your efficiency in completing tasks.
AppBlock
Best for:
- Temporarily blocking apps and websites
- Maintaining focus while working from home
- Setting usage time limits for specific apps
While smartphones can help us accomplish our work, they also serve as one of our biggest distractions. Staying focused is a key element to being productive while working from home. AppBlock is a free Android mobile app that helps build the discipline of focus among work from home employees.
Upon downloading it, you can easily set it up without an email address. When you try to open a blocked app or website, a blocking screen appears and sometimes, an ad when you are connected to the internet. Screen Time is its alternative for iOS users.
iAuditor
Best for:
- Using checklists that auto-generates reports
- Assessing and controlling health and safety risks
- Ensuring quality of work in home offices
Working from home does not exempt you from health and safety risks when performing your everyday tasks. Making sure that your home work environment is safe helps you work more efficiently. iAuditor is a free safety and quality checklist app available on desktop and mobile—you can download it on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
With premade industry best practice templates you can customize, iAuditor enables you to optimize your home workspace and raise your work-from-home practices. You can also save time by automatically creating, sharing, and filing reports the moment you complete going through a digital checklist. iAuditor is used 50,000 times a day in over 80 countries.
Daywise
Best for:
- Scheduling batched smartphone notifications
- Minimizing interruptions while working
- Receiving alerts from set VIPs only
Research shows that every time people are interrupted while working, it takes 23 minutes to get back to their original tasks. Daywise is a free Android notification scheduling app that gives you the ability to control when you can be interrupted and by whom.
Its free version contains no ads, and it is easy to set up—no email address needed. You can schedule batched notifications at a maximum of 4 times a day and view them neatly organized in one place. This work-from-home app is backed by Duke University and has been listed as one of the best new productivity apps last year.
Deepstash
Best for:
- Consuming curated ideas from online articles
- Self-improvement while working from home
- Organizing learnings in different collections
You can be more productive at home by improving your habits, especially reading. Deepstash is a self-improvement app that can act as your personal library of thoughts and knowledge. You can download it on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and instantly create a free account via Gmail or Facebook.
It presents the contents of any article in bite-sized chunks for users to easily absorb ideas at a glance. You can start by selecting at least 3 topics you want to learn more about, including time management, communication, and teamwork which are crucial when working from home. You can also save ideas for later and read them again in your stashes.
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