The Two Best Productivity Applications of 2022

Recently I have found myself running into two main issues:

• No great system for recording meeting notes and providing meeting goals/agendas

• My day quickly fills up with meetings and doesn’t give me allocated time to complete tasks

There are two great apps that have really helped fix these issues.

Fellow

Source: Fellow.App

Fellow is an application that syncs up with your calendar to allow you to take notes and linking them to that specific event. A couple great features that take this to the next level:

• All tasks that come out of your meetings get aggregated to a centralized to-do list

• You can link tasks across meetings

  • This is really helpful when something comes up in a meeting that you want to bring up in another meeting

    • An example is a task that came out of a 1:1 with my manager that required me to ask someone I manage. I linked this task to the 1:1 with my direct report so that when I open the notes for that 1:1, I would see the linked task

• You can link tasks directly to Jira

  • This is great for project related tasks, creating a direct link between Fellow and Jira that syncs based on the status of those applications

• Sending out meeting notes is a breeze

  • Send via Slack

  • Send via Email

• Creating templates

  • I have different templates for meetings depending on the type of meeting

    • 1:1’s have areas for topics I want to bring up vs topics my report is bringing up

    • Project meetings have areas for internal vs external communications

    • Internal meetings are short and simple

While Fellow is great on its own, I found that I now had a laundry list of to-do tasks that I couldn’t get done. That’s where Motion comes into play.

Check it out: Fellow.App

Motion (Use Motion)

Source: UseMotion.com

Motion is an application that also integrates directly with your calendar (Google or Office 365/Exchange). Here is how it works…

After connecting your calendar, next you setup some tasks. A task can be one time, reoccurring, flexible — with hard, soft, ASAP deadlines. When you add tasks, Motion will schedule the tasks on your calendar for you. When Motion schedules these tasks on your calendar, they appear as “free” rather than “busy” on your calendar, so your co-workers can book on top of them — that is unless you set the due date as a “hard deadline” or “ASAP”, then the event will show as busy.

If a calendar invite comes in where you currently have a task scheduled, Motion will automatically move your tasks around to fit as much as possible into the day and get all of your tasks completed on time.

It has saved me so much time in helping me better use my day and hold me to deadlines.

If I have one compliant, this is a newer application and currently does not integrate with other task applications. I manually have to load in my tasks each day (or after a meeting). This isn’t terrible though because not every task on Fellow needs time on my calendar — some tasks require me to bring something up in a 1:1 or send an email.

Check it out: UseMotion.com