 I've tried a dozen fantastic productivity apps in the past year, but I only kept using three of them, which are those and why they use them. Well, let's find out. Hey friends, welcome back to my channel. My name is Greg and I'm an online entrepreneur creating content that will help you become more productive and mindful. I want to show you why hustling 24-7 won't bring success and happiness. So if you want to find it out, then subscribe below and join our amazing community. Today I want to share with you my top three productivity apps that I recommend to every single person in 2021. I want to tell you about the advantages, disadvantages of those apps, how I use them. And at the end of the video, I'm going to share with you one special secret trick for each of those apps. So if you're ready, let's just begin. The first app that I started using in 2020 is the Todoist. This is a free note-taking app that I've discovered in Google while browsing for the best note-taking apps in 2020. And after I used it for a couple of minutes, basically I fell in love with it because it's super simple to use. You can organize all different tasks. You can create different projects. Then you can of course highlight priorities. You can track progress and it's really an easy app to use. It's a free app, but you can also buy a premium version. One costs three dollars and then for teams, for up to 50 people, it costs about five dollars per user. Now I used to do this throughout the day whenever I have to create a note or create a task for a later and I just use it on my phone. I also use it on my Mac or my PC. But generally I try to avoid using it in the morning because I really try to get in my flow. I want to focus on my most important tasks of the day and then I try to put away Todoist because there are many tasks there and I really don't want to get disturbed by using it. Now I use Todoist only for private things. I don't use it for business because for business I use a different app I'm going to tell you soon about, but I don't only use it for private tasks. I write down different movies. I want to watch different stuff. I have to buy or I have to check. For example, for groceries I use it if I make some plans and that kind of stuff. Now there are two things I don't like about Todoist. First of all, I have my MacBook and also my PC and the MacBook version, the desktop version, seems much better than the PC version. Now why is that so? I don't know but I just prefer the MacBook version. And the second thing is if you only need a very simple app for creating tasks then maybe Todoist is a bit too complicated for you. Well it's not really hard to use but it has a lot of features which you can obviously use if you need it. But if you don't need those features then well there may be other free apps available that are even more simpler to use. Now the second app I really love using and I highly recommend is Asana. I use Asana for all my projects for all my businesses and I simply love it. I try different project management tools before including Trello, Ryke, ClickUp, even Basecamp for example and some others and I always got back to using Asana. Now the cool thing about Asana is that it's free for up to 15 users. You can create different teams, you can create different projects within those teams then you can obviously assign those tasks to different people, you can track all the progress, you can use different kind of grids on, you can use columns, you can use basic system for creating tasks. Like you can set it up, you can customize it the way you want to and that's really cool about it and also the learning curve is not that steep. I think it's pretty easy to use but it takes sometimes to set it up. If you have like an online business, six, seven figure business, you can probably use just the free version of Asana. It's morning good enough but of course you can always upgrade it. Now generally I use Asana in the morning so after I finish with my morning routine, I open Asana, check out my main tasks of the day, then I kind of schedule them, check the priorities and then basically I close it and I start working on the tasks of the day. Now there are two disadvantages of using Asana. First one is it does take some time to get used to it and you need to set it up, you need to create different teams and so on and this takes some time. It's not too complicated at all but yeah it does take some time, you need to keep this in mind. And secondly you can only assign tasks to one person. So you cannot assign one task to more than one person which is something I don't like because in some cases it's good to assign one particular task to two people but yeah that's how it is. It's not a perfect management tool but it's a really advanced one that I really love using. By the way guys if you like this video please press the like button below. Now the third app that I really love using is Notion. I actually switched from Evernote to Notion in 2020 and actually I tried to do this twice. The first time I started using Notion I didn't really like it. It looked a bit too complicated for me and I really enjoyed using Evernote back then but then I gave it another try, a friend of mine convinced me to give it another try and actually I fell in love with it. Notional is basically a workspace, you can create projects, you can share those projects with different team members, you can create tasks, obviously assign those tasks to the right people, you can comment on different stuff, you can add in files, docs, you can connect Notion to different tools. It's basically a whole workspace in one advanced app. Now I use Notion for private and business actually and for private stuff I use it for basically journaling, adding in all the know-how if I watch an online course when I create book summaries and that kind of stuff. This is kind of the main reason why I started using Notion. Secondly I use it for investments to track what's happening. I use it for anything related to my health. I use it for traveling. Well I didn't use it that much in 2020 but I hope 2021 it's going to be better. Yeah let's see. Then I use it for different ideas, for quick tips and that kind of stuff and I really love using it for personal stuff. It is much more convenient than Evernote in my opinion. By the way a cool thing is that Notion is free for one person otherwise it costs up to eight or ten dollars per user per month but if you only use it for private stuff yeah you can just go with the free version. Now I also use it for business. I have all data in about branding, stories about marketing plans are in. Then everything related to social media is in Notion. Then all my YouTube scripts are in Notion. I'm actually using a system from Ali Abdaal. I copied it from him. Thank you Ali once again for sharing this with us. So yeah it's a great system that works really for business and private stuff and that's really powerful. Now I created two separate accounts. I have one for business and one for private things and I recommend you doing the same thing. It's just much more convenient and you can quickly switch between those two accounts. Now a couple of cons about using Notion. The first thing is it does take some time to set up. It's not that simple to set it up especially because there are so many features available. You can use templates. You can import templates from our people or Notion as some of its own templates. Some of them are pre-installed basically once you create a new account and that's a good thing. It does speed up the process but it does take some time to learn all other features that are available and some connections are not that easy to understand. So yeah you need to tweak it up a bit. Secondly when I exported all notes from Evernote to Notion all the images were lost. I don't know why this happened. I saw on the forums different people had the same problem so if you use different kind of tool for creating notes right now and then you want to export those or import them into Notion be careful about doing that and check if everything is working as it should. In the beginning of this video I told you I'm going to share with you three top hacks that I recommend for each of those apps that I just mentioned. Now my first hack for to do is you can actually schedule one year on vacation. I'm not sure if anyone used this feature in 2020 but I hope people used it in 2021 and what does this feature help you is you won't get reminders and stuff like this and also the karma score that is calculated won't calculate those days when you're on vacation. If you care about the score if you care about productivity well it's a simple hack you can just use it you can just press one button basically and it's all done. So once you're back from vacation you press this button again and this vacation mode is off. My favorite hack for Asana is the following. If you use bored view so you have different columns like to do doing done for example you can then create one special column for all important data. For example for social media what we use is we have one column called know-how and in this column you have like a link to google sheets with all the plans with all the kpis then there's another link to canva for example which we use for designing then there's another link for passwords for social media account and that kind of stuff. So basically everyone who has an access to particular project also has access to all those important files so this person does have to go to google drive or dropbox whatever but it just you know goes to Asana see all those important files in the column. Also you know different know-hows like different processes how we use different tools and that kind of stuff so you can just add it into one column super simple super easy for people to check it and it saves a lot of time and my favorite hack for notion is the following. So you can create quick tips in notion for example I have quick tips if I get stressed I have quick tips if I get sick for example I'm just working on this one then for example I wrote down if I'm ever gonna have kids you know there are some quick tips maybe not that important in this very moment some of them maybe are and you can just go in and see what to do for example if I get sick there are special things I can do to boost my immune system and I always forget about those things so they're just in notion and I can quickly access them with basically two presses. Also quick tips if I get stressed there's a special breathing exercise that I can do and I know that I can get stressed now and then I'm pretty sure you have the same issue so you can just go in check it out you don't have to remember it anymore you know where it's stored when the produce info is stored so you can just go there check it out use it and you're good for the day. Thanks for watching this video guys I hope you learned something new have a great day don't forget to follow your reception on Facebook Instagram and I hope to see you soon again take care