16 business productivity tools to supercharge your team
16 business productivity tools to supercharge your team

These days, working with a team has many new challenges — and many new solutions.

Remote work has become more common, which means teams are relying on technology more than ever to stay connected and collaborate. But even teams who do work together in person can reap the benefits of the technology landscape that's emerged to help make teams more cohesive and productive.

No matter what kind of work your team does, these apps and tools can help supercharge your productivity, resulting in time savings that get multiplied the more people you have on your team.

16 business productivity tools your whole team can use

Whether you need a task manager, a calendar planner, a time tracker, or another solution, these 16 business productivity tools are the best of the best when it comes to helping everyone in your organization save time and get more done.

Business productivity tools for email

Business productivity tools for email

Superhuman

How it works: Superhuman is the fastest email experience on Earth. With advanced features like AI triage, reminders, scheduled messages, read statuses, and more, Superhuman turns your email into a beautiful, productive, and lightning-fast experience.

How it makes your team more productive: The average person spends three hours per day on email. With Superhuman, your team can use built-in tools that are designed to get them through their inbox faster, plus powerful keyboard shortcuts that help them get to Inbox Zero in minutes.

How much time your team can save with Superhuman:

  • Just yourself: 3 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 15 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 30 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 150 hours per week
Learn more about Superhuman for Business

Business productivity tools for collaboration and task management

Business productivity tools for collaboration and task management

Trello

How it works: Trello is a project management tool that allows teams to custom-create cards, boards, and lists that keep tasks and projects organized and moving forward.

How it makes your team more productive: The average office worker spends up to three hours per day doing time-consuming, repetitive tasks. Where Trello shines is in its workflow automation tools and templates, which can streamline your team workflows by automating manual tasks, boosting collaboration, and finding process improvement opportunities to remove bottlenecks and room for human error.

How much time your team can save with Trello:

  • Just yourself: 3 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 15 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 30 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 150 hours per week

Slack

How it works: Slack is a digital workspace that uses channels, messaging, voice and video calls, and other functionality to help teams — whether they work together in-person or from all different places — communicate quickly and easily.

How it makes your team more productive: Before Slack, remote teams relied on email to communicate. That made it tough to have real conversations — email tends to be an asynchronous method of communication that can leave you and your team waiting long hours for replies. Slack allows for real-time conversations, whether they're just between you and another teammate, or involve the entire organization.

How much time your team can save with Slack:

  • Just yourself: It depends on the size of your team and how you use it, but a safe estimate is 2-3 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 10-15 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 20-30 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 100-150 hours per week

Google Workspace

How it works: Formerly known as G Suite, Google Workspace is a collection of collaboration and productivity tools that includes Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Gmail, and more.

How it makes your team more productive: Google Workspace not only allows your team to work together in real-time on documents, spreadsheets, and more. It also makes it easy to video, voice, or text chat, and offline features mean you can stay productive at any time and from any place, whether there's wifi available or not.

How much time your team can save with Google Workspace:

  • Just yourself: This will depend on how your team uses Google Workspace and its many collaboration tools, but with heavy use, a safe estimate is 4-5 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 20-25 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 40-50 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 200-250 hours per week

Best tools for automation and virtual assistants

Best tools for automation and virtual assistants

Zapier

How it works: Zapier connects different apps and tools, making it easy and user-friendly to automate tasks and workflows.

How it makes your team more productive: Zapier's biggest selling point is that it makes automation accessible to any team. Rather than wasting hours on busy work, you can automate it using Zaps, then have those hours back for more important tasks.

How much time your team can save with Zapier:

  • Just yourself: The average Zapier user saves 10 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 50 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 100 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 500 hours per week

Business productivity tools for notetaking and documentation

Business productivity tools for notetaking and documentation

Evernote

How it works: Evernote offers paperless, collaborative notetaking, document storage, project management, scheduling, and more. Evernote for teams allows every member of your organization to do all those jobs, collaboratively, in one digital place.

How it makes your team more productive: Have you ever spent frustrating minutes (or even hours) searching through shared Dropbox or Drive folders for a specific document? With Evernote, all notes and documents are quickly and easily searchable. Plus, your team can collaborate in real-time, track projects, and share knowledge.

How much time your team can save with Evernote:

  • Just yourself: 5 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 25 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 50 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 250 hours per week

Todoist

How it works: Todoist has been a beloved to-do list app for individuals for years, but what about for teams? From small business to enterprise, its team features include collaborative task management, real-time syncing across all devices and platforms (Mac OS, Microsoft, Android, iPhone, and more), big-picture project board view, centralized admin features, and more.

How it makes your team more productive: Todoist was built by a remote, bootstrapped team, for remote, bootstrapped teams. It's made for helping team members stay in communication and collaboration no matter where they are in the world.

How much time your team can save with Todoist:

  • Just yourself: It really depends on how you use Todoist — its many integrations with other popular productivity tools can multiply time savings, for some teams. But a safe estimate is 5-7 hours per week, at least
  • A team of 5: 25-35 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 50-70 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 250-350 hours per week

Best tools for databases and storing knowledge

Best tools for databases and storing knowledge

Airtable

How it works: Airtable can do a lot of things: store organizational knowledge, connect data and workflows, create custom apps that fit your team's exact business needs, and more.

How it makes your team more productive: Airtable is a powerful and almost infinitely customizable tool. While it'll come with a learning curve for new users, once you begin to unlock all the ways Airtable can help your team store, access, and update data, you'll find that the ways it can boost your productivity are only limited by your imagination.

How much time your team can save with Airtable:

  • Just yourself: It takes some time to learn how to be an Airtable power user. But once you've mastered everything from bases to formulas, Airtable can easily save you up to 20 hours per week, depending on your role
  • A team of 5: Up to 100 hours per week
  • A team of 10: Up to 200 hours per week
  • A team of 50: Up to 1,000 hours per week

Notion

How it works: Notion can act as a digital workspace, a wiki, a single source of truth for your organization's data and knowledge — basically, it's a customizable data source that can be as minimal or as powerful as your organization needs.

How it makes your team more productive: Because it's so customizable, there's really no limit to how Notion can help your team boost its productivity.

How much time your team can save with Notion:

  • Just yourself: This is another tool that's hard to pin down in exact numbers, just because of the sheer number of ways teams can use Notion. For a power user, it's probably safe to estimate you'll be able to shave 2-5 hours off your week.
  • A team of 5: 10-25 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 20-50 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 100-250 hours per week

Business productivity tools for calendars and scheduling

Business productivity tools for calendars and scheduling

Google Calendar

How it works: Google Calendar is a part of Google Workspace, but it's so powerful it deserves its own spot on this list. A simple, integration-friendly calendar app, Google Calendar makes it fast and easy to schedule meetings, send invites, attach a video meeting room, block off time on your calendar, see your schedule in days, weeks, or months, and more.

How it makes your team more productive: Google Calendar is a seamless way for teams to schedule meetings, events, or even personal blocks of deep work. You can share your calendar across your organization, making it easy for everyone to see one another's availability in real-time. And you can integrate your calendar with other productivity tools.

How much time your team can save with Google Calendar:

  • Just yourself: 1-3 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 5-15 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 10-30 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 50-150 hours per week

Calendly

How it works: Calendly makes it fast and easy to schedule meetings, either with those within your organization or with people outside of it.

How it makes your team more productive: Ever tried to schedule a meeting and gone back and forth over email to try to find a time that works for everyone? Not only is that frustrating, but it wastes a lot of time. Calendly eliminates that back and forth by allowing quick, easy scheduling during times when everyone is available.

How much time your team can save with Calendly:

  • Just yourself: 1-2 hours per week (or more, if you schedule a lot of meetings)
  • A team of 5: 5-10 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 10-20 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 50-100 hours per week

Business productivity tools for time tracking and invoicing

Business productivity tools for time tracking and invoicing

Toggl

How it works: Toggl is a time tracker, but also a project manager and hiring tool, making it an all-in-one productivity package for teams.

How it makes your team more productive: With Toggl, saving time isn't the point so much as reducing lost time. Studies have shown that daily time tracking can reduce lost hours by as much as 80 percent. But Toggl also offers insights about how you're spending your time, as well as easy, automatic tracking so you can save time, too.

How much time your team can save with Toggl:

  • Just yourself: 2-3 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 10-15 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 20-30 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 100-150 hours per week

Paymo

How it works: Project data is often scattered across many different platforms. Paymo is seeking to centralize it, putting client management, project management, time management and tracking, and invoicing all in one central platform.

How it makes your team more productive: Think about how much time your team loses having to manage their projects, manage their clients, track their time, and invoice, all on different platforms. With Paymo, all those processes happen in the same place. That protects your team from losing time, but also makes workflow processes so much smoother.

How much time your team can save with Paymo:

  • Just yourself: 2-5 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 10-25 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 20-50 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 100-250 hours per week

Best productivity tools for staying focused

Best productivity tools for staying focused

Freedom

How it works: Freedom is an all-purpose, cross-platform app and website blocker that can help you eliminate distractions and reclaim your focus and productivity at work.

How it makes your team more productive: Everyone gets distracted. It's inevitable. But Freedom can help eliminate some of the most common distractions by blocking time-wasting apps and sites — from social media to news sites — on your team members' devices. It gives the power back to your team members to control their own productivity, letting them choose what sites and apps get blocked, and when.

How much time your team can save with Freedom:

  • Just yourself: 12.5 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 62.5 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 125 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 625 hours per week

Forest

How it works: Forest is one of our most-loved productivity mobile apps for a reason: it turns focused work into a fun game, allowing you to grow a tree on your phone for each work session you spend un-distracted. Over time, your trees can turn into a whole forest that represents hours of focused, deep work.

How it makes your team more productive: Forest promotes productivity through challenges and rewards. If your team likes competition or games, Forest will help them stay focused on projects and tasks until they're finished.

How much time your team can save with Forest:

  • Just yourself: 10 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 50 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 100 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 500 hours per week

Brain.fm

How it works: Brain.fm provides a soundtrack for your workday composed of music that's meant to enhance your focus without ever grabbing your attention. It's music that's scientifically designed to sit comfortably in the background while you focus on your work.

How it makes your team more productive: Brain.fm's team of scientists is constantly working to prove and improve the science behind their concept. They've already completed numerous studies that show how the music they've selected and created can steer you toward focus — and keep you there.

How much time your team can save with Brain.fm:

  • Just yourself: 10 hours per week
  • A team of 5: 50 hours per week
  • A team of 10: 100 hours per week
  • A team of 50: 500 hours per week

Start with boosting your team's email productivity

Email is one of our most time-consuming tasks at work, but it doesn't have to be. Save 3 hours per person per week — and give your entire team faster, more efficient, more productive inboxes — with Superhuman.

Learn more about Superhuman for Business