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As solopreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners, we know all too well how difficult it can be to find time to spend with friends, family, and doing other activities we enjoy in our hectic schedules. We know spending time is important and that we should budget time wisely and say no when things overlap with our personal agendas, but unfortunately, that isn’t always the case.
Whether it’s making frantic phone calls, dealing with incoming messages, a last-minute meeting, or a looming deadline, these seemingly harmless tasks add up and often make it hard to pull our focus away from work. Most of us need a little extra guidance to ensure a healthy work-life balance, and luckily there are plenty of apps for work-life balance out there to help us keep our priorities in check.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of highly rated apps to keep you sane, active, and happy despite a full calendar. If you’re looking for the best ways to maintain your productivity, while still managing to make it to your uncle’s birthday dinner on time, then read on!
What is work-life balance?
Business News Daily defines work-life balance as “the state of equilibrium where a person equally prioritizes the demands of one’s career and the demands of one’s personal life.”
That means making sure that alongside your career successes, you’re also achieving adequate fulfillment in all of the other areas of your life—personal relationships, hobbies and interests, physical and mental health, personal growth, and more.
Why is work-life balance important?
On top of being an all-star entrepreneur, you hold many important roles in your life—perhaps you’re a parent, sibling, spouse, friend, caregiver, or team member. Of course, you want to fulfill these roles to the best of your ability, but it isn’t always easy.
Above all, however, your most important role is “yourself”—you need to make time to take care of your mental and physical well-being! Balancing your priorities can be a challenging task, but it’s important to remember that maintaining a good work-life balance is a vital part of your overall health.
Both stress, particularly chronic stress, and burnout have been linked to several health issues, including:
Hypertension
Digestive issues
Chronic aches and pains
Heart problems
Depression
Anxiety
Insomnia
Fatigue
Mood swings
Irritability
Not only is poor balance detrimental to your physical and mental health, it can also negatively affect your performance and productivity at work. In fact, according to a study published in IOSR Journal of Business and Management, work-life balance was found to have a positive and significant relationship with job performance overall.
When both spheres of life are well-balanced, you’re more motivated to work, you feel refreshed and energized during your work day, and you’re able to focus better, think clearer, and make better decisions.
Knowing all of this, it’s important to also note that everyone’s work-life balance looks a little different. You know yourself best, so it’s important to consider what balance looks like to you and what is important in your life. Just remember that the long-term impacts of poor work-life balance can easily sneak up on you, so you’ll need to regularly evaluate your lifestyle to make sure you’re still meeting all of your personal needs.
One of the most important ways to maintain work-life balance is finding effective ways to keep yourself organized. That’s why we recommend using technology such as apps that help you prioritize your daily tasks, organize your thoughts, and find time for your personal needs. Knowing where to direct your focus can be hard when you have a lot of things on your mind, but don’t worry, with the help of the apps we’ve suggested below, you’ll become a pro in no time!
Top 5 apps to improve work-life balance, starting today
1. Evernote—for when you need a second brain
There’s a reason why Evernote is one of the most well-known and highest-rated note-taking and task management apps out there. With a 4.4 star rating on the App Store and a 4.1 star rating on the Google Play store, Evernote covers all of your bases when it comes to managing your productivity.
Evernote’s web page
We love their sleek and easily customizable home dashboard because it allows you to view your most-used features first, such as your calendar, to-do list, or recent notes and clippings. It even has a scratch pad for you to quickly jot down your thoughts when you’re at your busiest, so you can turn them into notes later.
The “Tasks” feature is like a to-do list, but better, allowing you to connect related notes to your tasks, add due dates for work projects, schedule your tasks, set reminders for appointments, and assign tasks to your employees. The app’s features also seamlessly integrate with your google calendar, so that you can add reminders, notes, clippings, and more to relevant calendar events.
The best part is the app is FREE, although Evernote does offer paid plans as well that offer larger storage, syncing to more devices, AI functionality, and better integration with your workflow apps such as Microsoft Teams, Slack and Salesforce. Their “Premium” offering will run you about $7.99 per month, while their “Professional” option costs double, at $14.99 per month.
There are some great guides out there that can teach you to effectively use Evernote, such as this beginners guide:
HOW TO USE EVERNOTE | Stay Productive & Organised Online with Evernote (Beginners Guide)
You can download Evernote here:
2. Remember The Milk—for sharing lists with your partner
This is another fantastic app if you’re looking to both remember things and get things done. Remember The Milk is a smart to-do list creator that allows you to prioritize and categorize all of your tasks. You can even set reminders that can be sent to your devices via email, text, IM, Twitter, or device notifications (available on Android, iOS, and Blackberry 10).
RememberTheMilk’s web page
The list-sharing feature means that you and your partner can both have access to the same grocery shopping list or whatever other list you create. That way, you’re no longer doubling up on shopping on the way home.
Note that mobile push notifications from the Remember The Milk app are only available in the Pro version, which will set you back $39.99 per year. The Pro version also offers a subtask feature for additional organization.
Remember The Milk connects to Google Drive and Dropbox, which allows you to link relevant files to your tasks. And like Evernote, Remember The Milk can also integrate with your other workflow apps. The one other downside to Remember The Milk is that although you can add locations to your tasks, you are not able to include location-based reminders.
Check out this great tutorial on how to maximize and stay productive using Remember The Milk:
How to use REMEMBER THE MILK (RTM) for Getting Things Done (GTD)
You can download Remember The Milk here:
3. Todoist—for keeping track of work and personal life to-dos
PCMag named Todist its Editors’ Choice among to-do apps, ranking it five-out-of-five stars, and for good reason. The simple and easy-to-use design categorizes your tasks per day or into “Projects” that you can divide into sub-tasks. The project feature means you can separate your personal and professional to-do-lists. You can put pretty much anything on your list. Todoist even offers templates to get you started—from grocery lists and meal plans, to accounting tasks and meeting agendas. This is an incredible tool to help you get your personal and professional life sorted.
Todoist’s home page
An interesting feature of Todoist is its “Reports” feature. Todoist tracks your productivity, compiling daily updated reports and giving you a “karma” score. This score is based on your individual statistics and your personal goals. We also love that you can group, filter, and sort your dashboard in a way that works best for you. That way, the app is customized to best suit your needs.
There are dozens of ways you can set up your Todoist dashboard. Here’s a great video to get you started:
My Todoist Set-Up (Early 2022)
Todoist is a cloud-based service, so you can access your lists from anywhere, anytime. It’s also compatible with every major platform: Android, iPhone, iPad, macOS, Windows, Android Wear, Apple Watch, browser extensions, and the web. Alongside its free version, Todoist has two other offerings: Pro ($5 per month or $48 per year), and Business ($8 per person per month or $72 per person per year).
You can download Todoist here:
App Store | Google Play | Microsoft Store | Chrome Web Store
4. Pocket—for all those articles you want to read someday
Pocket is a bit different from the apps we’ve talked about so far. Formerly known as “Read It Later,” Pocket is a bookmarking app that saves articles that you come across during your day that you want to read, but don’t have time to in the moment.
Pocket’s home page
If you struggle with cluttered bookmarks of all the many articles you had planned to read at some point, or are always sending yourself links to remind yourself to read or watch something you’ve come across online, this is the perfect app for you.
Pocket’s beautifully-designed interface displays your bookmarks in a grid or list form and allows you to sort through them from newest to oldest, read your articles during your weekend reading hour, highlight quotes, mark your favorites, share articles with others, and discover recommended content from other long-form reading enthusiasts.
There is a paid “Premium” version for $4.99 a month or $44.99 per year, which adds a permanent library of all of your bookmarks. That way, if any of your favorite content is deleted off the internet, you can still access them from your library.
You can download Pocket here:
App Store | Google Play | Chrome Web Store
5. Shoeboxed—for decluttering receipts and tracking expenses
Shoeboxed is a receipt management app that takes the stress out of both your personal and professional finances. The same way Pocket helps to reduce your bookmark clutter, Shoeboxed sorts through your physical clutter—the piles of receipts you collect on your desk.
See also: Neat vs. Shoeboxed: Finding the Best App to Manage Receipts
Turn receipts into data and deductibles!
Simply scan any receipt, document, or business card using your mobile device’s camera and Shoeboxed will store them in the cloud. The app also OCR scans documents so that you can easily sort through them and retrieve them using the search feature. This is great if you’re looking to systematize your finance and accounting processes. When tax time comes around, you’ll be able to easily compile all your necessary documents for both your business and personal taxes. The app also offers integration with several apps including QuickBooks, Wave Accounting, Excel, Outright, Xero, and dozens of other tools.
Turn receipts into data with Shoeboxed ✨
Try a systematic approach to receipt categories for tax time. Try free for 30 days!
Get Started TodayThe Shoeboxed receipt app is FREE. But if you’re looking to take advantage of all of Shoeboxed’s features, popular digital-only plans include the Starter plan ($4.99 per month) and the Lite plan ($9.99 per month).
If you want to take advantage of Shoeboxed’s full service of offerings, including the Magic Envelope service where you can outsource receipt scanning, consider trying one of their more comprehensive plans: Startup ($23 per month), Professional ($47 per month), and Business ($71 per month). For a limited time, you can take 25% off all plans!
You can download Shoeboxed here:
6. Conjure—for creating lasting habits
Conjure is arguably one of the most advanced habit and behavior-tracking apps on the market today. It can be used to track not only your daily habits, both personal and professional, but also your time spent on projects, the measures you use to understand your progress, and your actual progress toward your objectives.
With its simplistic, clean and neat interface and user-friendly operation, this app can do far more than is apparent at first glance. Its intricate measures system means that a user can track absolutely any measurable habit, goal, or objective they can think of, and yet, it can be used as simply or as in-depth as each user chooses.
For example, you could use Conjure to track the time you spend playing with your kids, the reps you do in the gym, or the time you spend meditating each day. That way, you can keep an eye on the time you spend on yourself and maintain a good work-life balance.
Available on web, desktop, iOS, and Andriod, Conjure will keep all your habits and goals up to date across all platforms in real time. It also integrates with a number of useful applications that can boost your experience, such as MyFitnessPal for those aiming to lose weight or get fit, or Zapier so you can sync your workflow and business automation with your Conjure habits and objectives.
For those who like to tinker, Conjure offers a GraphQL API, so feel free to add your own integrations should your favorite apps not already be available. All you need to know about how to use Conjure is available in a comprehensive array of documents and guides on the website, and the developer is always hungry for feedback and suggestions.
The platform is available for free with limited usage and offers 2 pricing plans for those who would like a more holistic experience. For $8.99 per month, you can have unlimited access to all Conjure’s features, but for $14.99, you will receive an extra signup to give to someone who can’t afford it, some unique Conjure icons, and the knowledge that you are helping to improve and grow the platform.
You can download Conjure here:
Desktop | Google Play | App Store
Frequently asked questions
Why is work-life balance important?
Poor work-life balance is not only detrimental to your personal life and physical and mental well-being, but it can also negatively affect your performance and productivity at work.
What are the top apps that improve work-life balance in 2023?
1. Evernote—for when you need a second brain
2. Remember The Milk—for sharing lists with your partner
3. Todoist—for keeping track of work and personal life to-dos
4. Pocket—for all those articles you want to read someday
5. Shoeboxed—for decluttering receipts and tracking expenses
6. Conjure—for creating lasting habits
In closing
Improving your work-life balance is a challenge, but having the right tools to get started is the first step in gaining a healthier lifestyle.
Once you find the one that’s right for you, take the plunge! Get and stay organized to bring balance back into your life with these apps for work-life balance so that you can achieve work life balance in the way that best suits you.
Tomoko Matsuoka is managing editor for Shoeboxed, MailMate, and other online resource libraries. She covers small business tips, organization hacks, and productivity tools and software.
You might also be interested in:
How to Track Mileage for Tax Deductions with the Shoeboxed App
How to Scan Receipts With the Shoeboxed App: A Step-By-Step Guide
About Shoeboxed!
Shoeboxed is a receipt scanning service that supports multiple methods for receipt capture: send, scan, upload, forward, and more!
You can stuff your receipts into one of our Magic Envelopes (prepaid postage within the US). Use our receipt tracker + receipt scanner app (iPhone, iPad and Android) to snap a picture while on the go. Auto-import receipts from Gmail. Or forward a receipt to your designated Shoeboxed email address.
Turn your receipts into data and deductibles with our expense reports that include IRS-accepted receipt images.
Join over 1 million businesses scanning & organizing receipts, creating expense reports and more—with Shoeboxed.
Try Shoeboxed today!
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