Working from home has many perks, but staying productive and managing tasks that require office supplies can be tricky. If you need to work with paper documents like agreements or invoices, you know how important it is to scan them with high quality or quickly read documents with many pages. As a remote work lover, I can share my favorite tools for home office productivity. Some of them I’ve used for more than 5 years; others I’ve discovered recently, but they save me from having to go into the office.
iScanner
When I started working from home, I suddenly realized I needed a scanner. Every week, agreements with contractors, invoices, and other documents needed to be signed and sent off. In the office, it was an easy task that took a few minutes, but working from home without a scanner made that difficult. I’d have to find the nearest print center and have it scanned or printed just for one signature. It was a nightmare.
Fortunately, mobile apps for scanning and editing documents saved the day. My favorite is iScanner, which lets me get high-quality scans of documents, sign them on my phone, fill forms, and use AI features to polish them up. Dewarping and edge repair help make my scanned documents look better than their physical copies.
ChatOn
When AI can become a personal assistant, it would be a miss not to use it for work. I love the AI built into various services like Gmail or Grammarly for writing and editing texts and emails. So I decided to take it a little bit further and incorporate an AI chatbot into my workflow to boost my productivity, delegating tasks like analyzing web pages and PDF files. After a brief comparison, I chose ChatOn because it's cheaper than ChatGPT and offers multiple LLMs. For tasks related to research or competitor analysis, Perplexity Sonar can be more effective than ChatGPT, and Claude Sonnet can deliver better results when working with PDFs.
When I do research for my work, I sort through a lot of internet resources and PDFs. It’s time-consuming work and needs maximum focus. ChatOn offers special features like webpage analysis and PDF summaries that save me time and help me find even more insights.
Trello
Working from home has allowed me to take on more than one client, which means I need to plan my time juggling various projects, and sometimes it can be difficult. One client prefers to track tasks and time in Jira, another prefers Google Calendar, but in general, I have to manage all tasks in a single personal board to stay productive.
I’ve been using Trello as a task manager, and I love it. When I move cards with tasks between columns, I get the satisfaction of ticking a box. Trello helps me visualize my workload and focus on the most important tasks first. I actively use features like labeling and reminders to help me keep that focus.
And one big plus is that I can use Trello boards not only for work tasks, but also to create boards for shopping or planning holiday trips.
Miro
One of the big downsides of working from home is the lack of an offline meeting space for brainstorming. It's so cool sit with my coworkers in one room, freely communicating and capturing ideas, even the craziest, on a flipchart. At the end of the meeting, you can see the fruits of your creative labor on the board.
Remote work has changed this process. Miro online boards can be a successful substitute for a flipchart. You can brainstorm and work on ideas on an endless online board. It may even prove to be more convenient than working with a real flipchart, where your notes are limited by the size of the page. Also, an online board helps save time when you replace or analyze notes. And obviously, it’s a better approach for saving and sharing brainstorming results.
Zomni
Being productive can feel impossible when you have low energy. It’s a known fact that healthy nutrition, good sleep, and exercise help us to feel our best and do our best work. For me, the most difficult of these is getting good sleep, because after sitting in front of a screen all day, I have trouble winding down to fall asleep. I’ve been working on it, and I’ve started following recommendations from the Zomni app. The app has improved my sleep step by step, from avoiding bad habits to doing breathing exercises before bed. I saw a huge improvement in my sleep quality in just six weeks.
This was my list of the best apps to boost productivity while working from home. They helped with the challenges at the beginning of my work-from-home period. Lack of office appliances or offline meetings isn’t a problem now, and I can enjoy the benefits of remote work without the hassle.
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