I love iPhone apps that make my life simpler and more efficient. I also love apps that are free. These five iPhone apps meet both of those requirements, making them some of my favorite apps of late.
They aren't all perfectly congruent, either, saving me time and energy in different ways. For example, some streamline my social media feeds and incoming email, while others complete simple tasks, such as adding contact information to my address book when I get an email for a new person. I've been championing all five of these free iPhone apps for productivity since I discovered them, and I hope you enjoy using them, too.
5. Cloze
The iPhone app Cloze collects tweets, emails, Facebook posts, and other bits of communication from your contacts and prioritizes them based on people who are most relevant to you. In other words, if my boss tweets six times today and emails me twice, Cloze shows me his picture and snippets from all eight of those pieces of communication, all in one place. It's a wonderful tool for getting relevant information about people in your network. Also check out Cloze.com on the Web, which is even better in some ways than the Cloze iPhone app in how it displays information and makes it accessible to you.
4. Any.do
List-making and task-management app Any.do has a unique feature called the Any.do moment that encourages making a habit of reviewing your daily tasks. It also includes location-based reminders that actually work really well, so that if you want a reminder to water the plants when you get home, Any.do will chime and flash a message as soon as you get close to the front door. Overall, it's a great app for jotting down tasks and goals, then getting you to actually follow through on doing them. Chronic procrastinators will love the feature that lets you "snooze" a task, which Any.do will remind you to complete later… and again and again until you do it.
3. Brewster
The Brewster iPhone app may be one of the most visually appealing contact managers you'll find. Its visual display of faces breathes life into contact management, and its auto-generated lists make finding the people you need even easier. Brewster taps into multiple social networks for images of people you know. It insists on having access to your iPhone Contacts and either Twitter or Facebook to work, though—fair warning to extra-security conscious types and people opposed to joining online social networks.
2. Google Search
The basic Google Search app on iPhone now includes Google Now features, which act like personal assistants for a huge variety of things you need to do every day. The app delivers personalized information, such as directions to an upcoming appointment in your Google Calendar, traffic alerts before you leave your home, and even sports scores and game summaries from your favorite teams. These bits of information appear on "cards," and not only can you customize which ones Google delivers, the app can push them to you when they're relevant based on time or your location. Google Now has a ton to offer iPhone users that make life just a little more efficient. I'm a fan.
1. EasilyDo
1. EasilyDo
The free iPhone app EasilyDo works as a personal assistant and automation machine, taking care of a variety of tasks, and does even more than the Google Search app because it plays nice with other online services and companies. This iPhone app does it all! You can set it so that it will offer to add contact information to your address book when an email from a new person arrives. It can track packages when it detects a package shipping number has been sent to you by email. It monitors some of your social networks for important news, and even lets you pre-write "happy birthday" messages to go up on Facebook on the appropriate dates for your friends. It has saved me oodles of time and effort in the few weeks I've been using it. In fact, the app estimates precisely how much time: a total of 43 minutes over 59 tasks. Brilliant.
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