7 little-known but awesome productivity tools

1. Sunsama

Sunsama bills itself as a teamwork tool, but it's also a fantastic user-friendly app for individual users. It can display your current tasks in the form of a calendar or kanban cards.

Connect your "Google Calendar" or even several, and all tasks marked there will be in Sunsama. It is possible to export your projects to Trello, integrate with Slack and chat for teamwork.

2. Pomotroid

You've probably heard of the Pomodoro technique, which allows you to effectively alternate between work and rest periods. The principle is very simple: we work for 25 minutes, rest for 5 minutes. This makes it easier to concentrate on current tasks and not get tired.

Pomotroid will help you use this technique effortlessly. And this is perhaps the best of all the Pomodoro desktop apps. It is completely free and has a nice minimalistic design. The play / pause button starts and stops the timer, red indicates the running time, green for a short break, and blue for a long break.

The length of the time periods is configurable, so if the standard Pomodoro technique seems uncomfortable to you, you can easily change it. The app is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.

3. Pomocado

Pomocado works right in your browser and uses the same Pomodoro technique as Pomotroid. But this service also allows you to track how efficiently you spend your work time.

Sign up for Pomocado, open the web app, and start the Pomodoro Timer, starting up. When you start the timer, the service marks the periods of your activity and rest on a special schedule. Then you can take a look at it and assess how you are using your time.

And remember, the longer you use Pomocado, the better the schedule gives you a sense of how you organize your time.

4. Orrange New Tab

A very useful and handy extension for Google Chrome, with which you can make the most of your start page. Orrange New Tab collects all your tasks, emails and other things that require your attention on it.

You can connect various services to the extension, such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Todoist, Wunderlist, Trello, Asana, GitHub, and Pocket, and also configure which of them will add tasks to be created.

Orrange New Tab also displays the clock, weather and beautiful automatically updated backgrounds on the start page.

5. ToDo Tab

Like the previous extension, ToDo Tab helps you use the Chrome start page effectively, but takes a completely different approach. There are no pretty wallpapers, Pocket articles, mail, or other distractions. With ToDo Tab on every new Chrome tab, you only see your to-do list.

ToDo Tab has one simple but very useful feature. The extension automatically marks your actions in different colors depending on which words or phrases are present in a particular task. You can configure the extension so that tasks containing the words "letter" or "Gmail" are highlighted in red, "buy" - in green, and "write" - in orange. Create as many color codes and associations as you like. This will help you easily distinguish tasks from each other.

6. OneTab

When you have so many tabs open in your browser that you can drown in them, OneTab will help. This is a simple extension that instantly closes all tabs in your browser and creates a list of them that is easy to navigate.

In OneTab, you can group tabs in different ways, move them, export, publish on the web, and even share using a QR code.

7. Zask

Zask is the easiest app to track how much time you spend on your work. Create a to-do list and when you start, click the Play button to start the timer. When done, click Pause to take a break, or mark the task as complete to stop the clock.

You can use the service without registering, but by creating an account, you can save to-do lists for later.