Your Apple Watch is great, hands down. But it is primarily used to improve your health with those habit trackers and water reminders. But, did you know that your Apple Watch can also help you ace those work deadlines? There are some great Apple Watch productivity apps on the App Store, especially if you are looking forward to achieving the best of both worlds.
I have made a list of Apple Watch productivity apps that I cannot live without. The majority of these apps can be synced with your iCloud and are free to use. A couple of paid ones on the list, but hey, don’t we want a better standard of living than saving those few dollars a month? Let’s look at these apps.
- Productive
- Focus
- Apple Maps
- iTranslate Converse
- IFTTT
- Things 3
- MultiTimer
- Cheatsheet Notes
- Pennies
1. Productive – Habit Tracker: Ace your routine!
A Webby Award winner for the best mobile site, Productive has an Apple Watch app now. A free and an easy to use tool, Productive helps you inculcate positive changes into your life.
Push yourself because no one else is going to do it for you. Make small goals, track your progress, and be your competition. Productive even does wonders for adults battling with ADHD by helping them develop and achieve their daily routine.
Key features:
- Challenges: Have small challenges developed to breakdown and help get closer to your target eventually.
- Habit Management: Build and work on your habits according to your convenience. Change them as and when needed.
- Statistics: Track your habits and analyze your progress. Don’t forget to keep up with your streak!
- Siri shortcuts: Siri shortcuts for trivial app features works as a perfect add-on to track your habits.
- Habit Trends: An assembled data curated by monitoring your daily habits. This content is updated every week.
Are you a working professional like me who constantly needs reminders for trivial activities such as drinking water? Well, Productive is an app that can help you achieve that. The Apple Watch implementation makes it even easier to focus on managing a quality work-life balance.
Price: Free (In-app purchases start from $3.99)
2. Focus – Time Management: Manage your time like a pro!
Since our school days, we have gotten used to sticking to a timetable to maximize productivity. Focus takes me back to those days again, as it is one of the best time management apps I have ever come across.
The app is designed for increasing your productivity during your working hours, thus building your efficiency, albeit one task at a time. Focus structures your routine with a session-based model, with a uniform distribution of work + break hours.
Key features:
- Task Manager: Organize your work intuitively. The task manager lets you focus on one task at a time and will not let you move to the next one till this is accomplished.
- Focus Sessions: The Focus Sessions work in a fun way. You get a short break every time you work for 25 minutes. After four such sessions, get a long break.
- In-depth statistics: A perfect solution to keep a check on the time you spent procrastinating. Keep track of your work and in-depth motivating statistics.
With Apple Watch integration, Focus lets you track your progress at a single glance, which I find more comfortable than going to my iPhone now and then. The app is a great help for reducing your stress levels by creating micro-level work zones. The monthly subscriptions cost less than a cup of coffee. Well, caffeine or productivity app to boost your adrenaline? I rest my case.
Price: Free (In-app purchases start from $4.99)
3. Apple Maps: Travelling made easier!
Apple Maps is the OG mapping service developed by Apple themselves to smoothen your riding/driving experience. It provides directions and estimates your time on the journey, regardless of the mode of transportation chosen.
Apple Maps’ Apple Watch integration works wonders while commuting as you need not look at your iPhone repeatedly to know the route.
Key features:
- Refine Location: Get highly accurate location while moving through those dense urban areas.
- Speed and red-light cameras: Get notified about approaching speed and red light cameras before reaching the point.
- Guides: Navigation shows you great places to eat, shop, and explore while navigating. These guides are automatically updated to keep up with the latest recommendations.
- Make reservations: Make hotel reservations, dial phone numbers, and open websites directly within Maps.
- EV Routing: This one’s a boon for electric vehicle owners, for the Maps automatically designs a route with charging points on the way.
Maps work perfectly with Siri too. Ask questions like, “find coffee near me,” and choose your mode of transport, and that’s it. Your watch will take care of the rest.
Price: Free
4. iTranslate Converse: Heaven for solo travelers!
iTranslate Converse is a revolutionary speech translation app, much-needed for travelers. With an easy-to-use interface, a simple design, and conversions in over 38 languages, it holds excellent potential.
Conventionally, you had to talk to your iPhone’s microphone to translate the content. With Apple Watch, the translation procedure works similarly. All you have to do is hold the button while talking, and the app will translate your phrase and talk to your barista on your behalf.
Key features:
- Real-time results: The app delivers translation in real-time, of course, with good internet connectivity, to not keep you hanging in a foreign land.
- Automatic language detection: The app automatically detects both languages to offer a seamless translation.
- Automatic transcripts: The app creates transcripts automatically for every voice conversion.
- Wide translation button: The entire screen will be your translation button, tap it and start talking.
- A wide array of content: The app has more than 38 languages to offer, covering the most popular languages worldwide.
Being a backpacker myself, I find myself stuck at odd places with tons of language barriers, of course. Well, learning the basic phrases is different, and holding up the entire conversation is different. iTranslate Converse translation has made the journey easier for me.
Price: Free (In-app purchases start from $4.99)
5. IFTTT: Best Apple Watch productivity app
My personal favorite, and one of the best-integrated apps across the App Store, IFTTT is a boon for multitaskers. With over 600 app integrations, IFTTT turns out as a one-stop solution for every entrepreneur out there.
Applets bring your favorite services to sustain an ideal work-life balance for people like us. IFTTT integrates with your Apple Watch’s health app to track and maintain your habits, which is a bonus for Apple Watch users. It can be a substitute for a great habit tracker.
Key features:
- Daily weather forecast: Keep yourself updated with daily weather forecast notifications.
- Organize your Social Media: Streamline your social media content, add photos to Instagram, Pinterest pins, or even Twitter photos.
- Smart home security: Keep yourself updated with smart home security. Adjust your house’s temperature to feel the warmth when you reach home.
- Voice control: Control every feature with your voice, even with your Apple Watch.
- Custom alerts: Get alerts for your interested listing across Craiglist to not miss your next room alert or some crazy iPhone deal across the internet.
I have been automating my everyday tasks between apps by building a custom workflow. The possibilities are endless, be an opportunist and pick your apps wisely. I have been using the app to send custom notifications every day, even for the pettiest of things, such as sunset times and birthday notifications. The best part; I customize my notifications myself.
Price: Free (In-app purchases start from $4.99)
6. Things 3: Best app for task management
Are you focused on achieving your goals on time? Are your super passionate about your dreams? You need a task manager, and Things 3 is one of the best ones with Apple Watch compatibility.
Neatly organize your life, from everyday tasks to your biggest life goals, and get the stress off your mind. Utilize your time more efficiently and focus on activities that matter today. I adore the combination of a great UI and UX, and Things 3 is a perfect amalgamation of the two.
Key features:
- Real-time projects: Establish your work-life balance by building new products for both spheres. Add to-dos to help you achieve that target and check them from your Apple Watch.
- This evening: Plan a romantic evening with your SO, or head out to a bar with your friends; let your Apple Watch notify you.
- Repeaters: Work smartly by repeating basic to-dos to save you from the unnecessary efforts of creating trivial repetitive to-dos.
- Mail to things: When you forward a mail to Things 3, it automatically becomes a to-do.
- Tags: Categorize your to-dos in the list with attractive tags.
I always wanted a virtual assistant of a sort who continually reminds me of my goals by taking a small fee in return. Things 3 is a perfect replacement for my human VA. It is crisp, lightweight, and from what I hear, Apple awarded the app for its design! Imagine sneaking a glance at my watch in the middle of a meeting to realize it’s my Dog’s poop time; haha!
Price: $9.99
7. MultiTimer – Multiple Timers: Best for traders
Being an entrepreneur, you need to keep track of every minute. The amount of time you spend on eating food, your screen time, or the time needed to finish a particular task. MultiTimer is a versatile countdown and stopwatch timer app with power-packed features and a simplified user interface.
The app comes with no garnish or banner ads; it only has productivity to offer. Creating multiple timers simultaneously, categorizing them according to your needs, and checking their progress later is a bonus.
Key features:
- Customizable boards: Arrange your timers using these boards in different layouts.
- Countdown limits: The countdown limits to achieve your tasks are up to 100 days, in hours, minutes, and seconds. This is extremely helpful for long-term track records.
- Siri shortcuts: Siri shortcuts to ease out the functionality.
- Timer diversity: Different set types of timers available; Countdown, Quick, Count-up, Pomodoro, Interval, Stepped, Stopwatch, Lap, Counter, and Clock, to name a few.
- iCloud Support: With iCloud support, you can sync timers from every iOS device and monitor them from any device.
I admire the automatic timer feature. I need timers for different purposes, such as medicines and exercises, and the app saves me from doing it manually every time! The fact that the app keeps revising its content to cater to its user’s needs is just mindblowing.
Price: Free (In-app purchases starts from $3.99)
8. Cheatsheet Notes: Digital virtual assistant!
Can I be more thankful for those password managers that remember all my combinations? Well, consider Cheatsheet to be an advanced version of that. The app remembers the little things that you often tend to forget. (No, it will not remind you to send flowers to your girlfriend. :D)
This is an app to remember your hotel rooms, license plates, luggage combination, ID numbers. Refer to them anytime on the phone and paste them anywhere with the custom keyboard.
Key Features:
- Diverse icons: More than 200 icons to recognize what you are looking for and categorize them accordingly.
- Siri shortcuts: Use combinations as ‘find notes in Cheatsheet’ or ‘Add notes to Cheatsheet’ to add content to the app.
- Edit content from your wrist: Add or delete content directly from your wrist.
- Customizable interface: Customize your cheats by changing colors and more according to your preference.
Once I got used to my cheats, it became easier for me to remember which levels I parked my car or my friend’s hotel room number while traveling. Syncing the content on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch using iCloud is rock solid. Much appreciated feature.
Price: $4.99
9. Pennies – Budget and Expenses: Track your finances efficiently
Pennies is the budgeting app for everyday people, like me and you, who find adulting hard. It is an expense tracker app that will help you save some extra bucks rather than ordering Joey’s special or that Tesla you have been eyeing for a year.
The app categorizes your spending and shows you the limit to which you can have a decent saving towards the end of the month. The app offers you weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, twice-monthly, and on-off budgets that can start anytime you want.
Key features:
- Finance health: Monitor your financial health using your watch. Pennies set your daily spend limits and show them on your screen daily.
- Unlimited budgeting: The app lets you make unlimited budgets on the app and access them from any device due to iCloud syncing.
- Flexible expenses: Add your previous expenses to your expenses, and Pennies will recalculate your budget and show you the daily limit accordingly.
- Multiple currencies: Supports all the major currencies of the world. Thus, you can calculate your expenses in your preferred currency.
Budgeting shouldn’t be boring; it should be done to make you feel more responsible about your savings and cautious about your spending. Self-care is good, but Pennies has helped me avoid all those unnecessary expensive shoes or cute tops that I would have gotten otherwise when in a bad mood.
Price: $3.99
Have you tried these best Apple Watch apps to boost your productivity?
Boosting one’s productivity is a vague concept. Being aware of your life and having a decent work-life balance can help you boost your productivity. And these Apple Watch productivity apps help you work smarter, not just harder.
I stick to using IFTTT for most of my work schedule. After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! Which of these apps are you using? Let me know in the comments below.
Read more:
- How to change text size on your Apple Watch
- How to set up and use fall detection on your Apple Watch
- Use Cardio Fitness on iPhone and Apple Watch (Fitness guide)
