The Apps I Use While Working From Home

Staying productive can be difficult, especially while working from home. Luckily there are a lot of apps that are here to help you communicate, stay organized, and get things done faster. Here I have assembled a list of awesome apps that can help you deal with remote work and get on top of any day.

Task management: Planndu
What makes Planndu one of my favorite task management applications is the fact that it has all the features I need to manage my whole workflow. You can create a list of tasks, prioritize them, schedule, and even focus on specific tasks with a Pomodoro timer. It also allows drag & drops to change the status and the priority of tasks, which I find very convenient. So once a task is done, all I have to do is drag the task to the “done” section. Most of the features are free but to unlock the advanced features you must have a premium account. It costs $2.95 a month (billed annually) which I think is an excellent value for the features provided.

Meetings: Zoom
It’s the ideal tool for meetings and screen sharing. Thanks to those features the platform grew exponentially and became so popular. Even though they had a bunch of security problems at the beginning, now it’s a solid and stable software that you should use. It’s mostly free but there’s a limit of 40 minutes of meetings and 100 participants. The paid plans get a little bit pricier, starting at $14.99/month per person.

Chatting: Slack
The best app for communication with colleagues and quick code sharing, it has many features such as channels, personalized chats, and formatting that is suitable to code. It’s very commonly used in enterprises, but I also use it for remote work mainly because it has a free plan of 10k messages. Slack has a Pro plan for $6.67/per user per month if you want more features. They also have more features with their Business+ plan for $12.50/user per month (billed annually).

Collaboration: Zeplin
It’s an excellent collaboration tool that helps designers share their work with developers. It automatically adds many tooltips on top of the design, allowing any person to understand the specifications within the design itself. It also lets you comment right on top of the design, and saves a lot of time explaining things to each other. The downside is that it allows creating only 1 project for free with up to 6 project members. But you can unlock the full version of Sketch for $6 / month.

Remote work is the new standard. There’s no way it will change soon. If you are in the same situation as me, and you are a freelancer working from home full time, remember that there are many tools that could help you in the process. Don’t try to solve everything by yourself, and make sure you try new things until you find what works for you.