The 10 Best iPhone Productivity Apps in 2021

this video is sponsored

by skillshare today we are going through 10 of my favorite productivity

apps for the iphone here in 2021.

though i'm actually going to start this list out with a productivity

feature of the iphone that isn't actually an app but is useful nonetheless

it's this little magnetic

wallet thing that you can get from apple that just snaps onto the back of

your phone but the cool thing is it's got this little

sliding thing where if you have a credit card that you frequently use or

in my case an office access key it's very easy to slide it up

scan it wherever you need to scan it and put it right back on

your phone just like that so i figured i'd mention that because i've been

enjoying this and it's definitely a purchase that i don't regret

let's get into the list of apps and the first app we're going to

talk about is called otter which is an amazingly

good ai voice transcription

app so as a youtuber

i get a lot of ideas for content

often at times when i can't easily either write something down or pull my

phone out to take notes and in those cases i take a lot of

voice memos but a lot of times i would love to have those voice

notes translated into so i can then port them over to notion or use

them and actually you know go through the text and edit it and things

like that otter is

freaking amazing at doing that i've tried a ton of other apps some that

have apple watch integrations

which i really would like for otter but they use this built-in siri dictation

which is just not

that great at translating your voice into readable text meanwhile

otter does not as far as i can tell have a real human shoved

into your phone who's literally

you know acting as a court

and typing out your text

but it might as

the transcription is nearly as good as the human transcription

that i actually pay for for these youtube videos

which means that when i speak something while i'm driving or i'm out on

the bike i can basically guarantee that when i come and read the text

later on it's going to look pretty much like i said it it also

keeps the audio file it's not quite as high quality of an audio file

as you get with regular voice memos so i don't use it for song

ideas but it does keep the audio file which is nice because it allows

me to export both the audio file

and the text into

drum roll please the very next app on our list which is

you saw this coming

notion so notion is an app that i talk about a lot in fact

i have a entire second channel called thomas frank explains

full of notion tutorials

link in the description

down below if you're curious

and if you haven't heard of notion it is basically an all-in-one workspace

app which allows you to take notes it allows you to manage tasks it

allows you to do pretty much anything you want and at this point i'm

using it fully for running my channel for managing my tasks for running projects

and for taking all the notes that i want to take and for writing

all the scripts for my videos

the last time i talked about notion on my channel there was no actual

official widget but now there is and in fact there are a couple that

are very useful which i want to show you right now the one that

i keep right on my home screen here is the favorites bar and a

trick that i use is i keep a dashboard

page with links to a lot of things i'm working on because i often have

more links than will fit on this widgets

area i think it only keeps

about nine links at one time so using this dashboard

i can actually create like a central place for

all of the important things in my life including my tasks my notes content

with my channel with thomas frank explains my other channel and ongoing

projects and i have like this hub page that allows me to easily get

to anything i want to get when i want to add something or reference

the other nice thing though is there's another widget which i keep over here

on this quick access area which shows you your recent pages so instead of

relying just on your manually created favorites bar you have all of your recent

pages right here and i can get to

say the research and notes for

this very and look there's otter there's notion

and there is our third app which i'm going to now smoothly transition into

so authy is a manager

for two-factor authentication codes that functions a lot like google authenticator

hopefully you are using two-factor authentication

on any account that offers it in addition to your passwords

if you care about your online security

now one thing you might not know about two-factor authentication

is there's two different types

sms based or text message based

and app-based like google authenticator

or in this case

authy sms-based authentication is actually a lot less secure because

identity thieves and you know hackers and people like that have been known to

spoof your sim card essentially calling up your phone company convincing them that they

are you and convincing them to

set up a new device with the exact same sim

so they get the text messages that you're supposed to get including

to factor off messages

which is why whenever i have the choice i use app-based

authentication instead of text message authentication

but there's a problem

with app-based two-factor auth especially with google authenticator

at least last time i used it it didn't sync

between different devices which means if you accidentally

drop your phone down an elevator shaft you're out of luck and you have

to spend a ton of time doing password resets

or hopefully pulling you know backup codes that you had for your two-factor

it's a whole big mess so that's why i like authy because you can

log into your account and get your two-factor

auth codes back and as long as you're using a secure password for that

account i think it's still pretty secure now the next step that we're going

to talk about is the only one on my list that doesn't have an

android equivalent this is an app called command

which is actually a web browser and it has a killer feature that you

probably know about if you saw my ipad video earlier this year

that feature is that you can highlight

text within any web page

and then once you highlight

not only is it going to stay

highlighted or highlit i'm not sure how you're supposed to say that

when you refresh the page but you can also tap your highlights

and you can add journal entries which allow you to essentially take notes on

the highlights you make i have written

entire articles inside commands

journal feature because i'll take a highlight from something i'm reading on the web

get inspired and then i'll just you know think i'm going to take a

little bit of a note and then it balloons into a huge article

the other thing that i love about command is it actually can send the

highlights that you take to your read wise account

and i guess i should just talk about read wise now because it is

the next app on our list so read wise is basically a highlight manager

for the knowledge that you intake from various sources

books kindle books podcasts

using an app called air which i will talk about a little bit later

even tweets and content

from your web now there is a way to sync highlights from mobile safari

to read wise but it's kind of a friction

full process and command makes it much

much easier so i love doing research and doing highlighting using the command browser

when i'm reading blog posts and

but coming back to read wise read wise is essentially a highlight manager that

can resurface and help you recall

the knowledge that you gathered over time it's got this daily review area which

will actually give you a collection

of different highlights so you can remember them more usefully

i don't use that too much what i actually do is i kind of

use this as a database

for a lot of the highlights that i take in books and other pieces

of media but the thing that i really love about raid wise is that

not only does it store all of my highlights here like these highlights from

the book askiwata that i've been reading really recently

but there is a native integration

with both notion and with rome research

and also with rem note i believe

so whenever you take a highlight from kindle or from the command browser or

from even the safari extension or

read wise to roll up a tweet thread

it'll send it to read wise and then read wise will dutifully kick that

highlight to your integration

platform in my case it's notion so i have a beautiful raidwise database

on notion where i've got all of my highlights from books and articles and

all kinds of media sources

and then when i'm doing research for an article

i can pull in my highlights

into my research areas and actually now with notions synced blocks feature i don't

even have to copy and paste i can just create a synced block and

port content over from my highlights area into

whatever article that i'm writing which is pretty sweet next up on our list

is one called tide which is my favorite pomodoro

timer for the iphone

now it's got a ton of different features it can track your stats it's

got all these sounds so you can create these soundscapes

to help you focus

personally i just like the way that it looks i like the fact that

it's free and i like the fact that i can open up i can

hit the focus button i can choose 25 minutes and i can start a

pomodoro session and like i've said before the pomodoro

technique is one of the most powerful

short-term productivity techniques there

because it externalizes the self-discipline

that you need to keep

but it also reframes your task from output based to input based as in

i have to write a paper which is really daunting and scary too i

just need to work on this paper for 25 minutes and then i'm allowed

to take a the next step on my list is actually a built-in

app in the phone so if you have an iphone you already have this

and it's the fitness app or i don't know if it's called fitness or

activity but this is absolutely

a productivity app for me because when i'm active

when i'm moving when i am exercising

every day i also feel more energetic and i get more done and i

work with more focus

exercise is absolutely associated

with cognitive performance and if you want to learn more about that there's a

great book by dr john ratey called spark

highly recommend that especially if you like books full of scientific

studies but having this app and specifically

its integration with the apple watch

and the face here that shows me around my rings every time i look

at the apple encourages

me to get my exercise

done i've actually got the trends thing activated here so i can see that

pretty much all my trends are on the up i've been moving more i've

been exercising more i've been standing more

walking more all kinds of stuff

one of my favorite things about the fitness app is the sharing aspect of

it so if we go over to the sharing tab you're going to see

that i actually have shared my fitness data and vice versa

with some of my friends brian from real engineering

who probably forgot to put on his apple watch today

my friend chris who wrote the productivity

project in hyperfocus my agent dave and also renee ritchie from the channel renee

ritchie who talks a lot about apple

so using the sharing feature we all get notified when we work out we

send each fun emojis

to encourage each other we'll sometimes

check in and be like hey how come you haven't gotten your workout done

today it adds some nice accountability

into your daily exercise routine even if your friends are far flung across the

globe next up on the list is audible which is an app that i've

been using for a very very long time but i've actually been using a

lot more heavily recently

i am now riding an e-bike

to my downtown co-working office on any day where i don't have to sit

in this chair and film videos in my studio and i absolutely

love riding my bike getting out of the house going somewhere else to work

and that whole process of writing actually about 40 miles on the e-bike

gives me a ton of time to listen to things that i can use

to educate myself so audible

is probably my number one resource for that since i love listening to audiobooks

and one thing that i did want to point out on the iphone now

that home screen widgets feature is live

is that audible has a widget which allows you to scroll down and basically

resume the last book that you were listening to or pick one of the

four that you listened to most recently other than that one so it's a

nice way to just launch into a book that you were listening to recently

without having to open up the app and wait for it to load next

up on our list is an app called adobe scan which is probably the

best document scanner app on the iphone this is going to look really weird

because you're going to see a camera and i'm moving it around

hi other camera anyway this is a great app for scanning

paper documents and then exporting them as pdfs

or as picture files and porting them into your knowledge management system in my

case it's going to be notion it might be rom research or evernote for

you but it's really nice to have a document scanner app on the phone

next up we have spotify

for podcasts yep i have finally switched over to just using spotify

as my default podcast

player i resisted it for a very long time i was a pocket casts

fan but it's good enough now in spotify

they've got the speed controls they've got the sleep timer function

and uh it's fast that's really nice thing

now i really wanted

to recommend an app

air instead of spotify

in this slot in the video

air is a really cool podcast

player that has a killer feature my friend ali abdull actually turned me on

to this app so you may have heard him talking about it if you

watch his videos but air is not just a podcast

player it's also an app that integrates with

read wise and it has this really cool feature where if you're listening to

something in a podcast

episode and you want to make a highlight of it you want to save

it you want to add a note to it you can do that by

hitting this little quote button here and it's going to save either last 30

seconds or last minute you can change

the duration if you want

and you can add a little note and it's going to send that to

raidwise which again would send to notion or roam research or rem note if

you have that integration

created it is super cool but the performance of this app is just

it's just not great right now it's slow if i want to like rewind

15 seconds it takes

like five seconds just to do it and start playing again so i'm really

hoping that they're going to improve the performance

of this app and once they do that i'm going to be probably switching

over to using it because i really do want to use that read wise

feature i just need it to be faster now if you're watching a video

on my channel about iphone apps then i would say it's probable

that you also watch one of my favorite tech

marquez brownlee aka mkbhd

and if you do i want to let you know about a new course

he just launched over on skillshare

all about how to create great youtube videos

i cannot think of many other people who i would rather have teach me

how to make a great youtube video than marquez

especially because his quality

is well let's just use the term that he uses it's absolutely

crispy it's amazing i've taken a lot of inspiration

from his setup his gear the way he films things to improve the quality

of the footage on my own channel and if you want to learn how

to upgrade your own youtube game or even start a channel if you haven't

done it yet his course over on skillshare

is a great place to start

and the wonderful thing about skillshare

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also on skillshare you're going to find classes in graphic design

in video in music production

in storytelling and public speaking there is a ton that you can learn on

skillshare and it's also a very affordable

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sign up for skillshare today using the link down below you're going to get

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to pay anything it's a great platform i really think you're going to get

a lot of value out of it and you're going to want to keep

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go to that link down in the description below sign up be one of the

first thousand people to get that free

one month trial thank you for watching this video hopefully you found something helpful

here and i would also like to hear from you what are your favorite

apps that i did not mention in this video

leave them down in the comment section below and we can all try new

things out and uh you know probably end up spending too much time on

our phones and not actually being productive whoops anyway i'll see you in the next video