Four Productivity Apps — Brian Manning

Here are four apps that I've been using recently that have increased my productivity.

Accompany. This app will scour your calendars and see who you're meeting with in the coming days and weeks and will build out a profile for each person that includes news mentions, bios listed on the web and updates from their presence on Twitter, AngelList, Crunchbase, LinkedIn and other social networks. It pulls everything into a one-page profile. Just prior to your meeting it will send you an email with all of these details. Last week I was at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas and found it invaluable. As I walking between meetings I could read through the manifest for my next meeting and get a refresh on who I was about to talk to. Following the meeting it adds the people you've met to your network and it will continue to push out updates. You can set preferences so you only get updates on people you want to hear about.

MobileDay. I’ve been using this one for a while but just started using it more often. MobileDay scours your calendars for upcoming conference calls and pulls the conference call dial-in details into the app and pushes you a notification just prior to the meeting so that you can dial into the call with just one click. You just literally just click on the notification and it will dial you in. This is so much better than switching between my calendar app and phone app trying to remember a ten digit number to get dialed in.

Brain.fm is an app that has ambient sounds on a timer that helps with intense focus. I often listen to music when I'm writing but I've found that if I really need to focus on something for a sustained period of time the sounds on Brain.fm work a lot better than Spotify. Note that the app requires you to be online so when I’m on a plane or somewhere without access to the internet I'll use the Noisli app. Not as good but gets the job done.

Astro is an AI-powered email application. It's pretty amazing and I'm not sure I'm getting everything out of it that I could. The more you use it the smarter it gets. It does a great job of building a priority inbox based on the emails you open and the people you email often. And it has a bot that pushes questions to you about your contacts and makes recommendations and reminders to follow up on important emails. It also can track email opens and has a send later feature. I understand that there's a lot more coming as Astro is building a big AI company around the app. The sooner you download this one the better.