My iPhone home screen has most of the default apps that Apple gave me right out of the box — Calculator, Clock, Health, Mail, Maps and Notes never have to fear the threat of getting booted.
The same goes for the lineup of apps that help me do some quick shopping, pull up my gaming profiles to brag about my collection of trophies/achievements and argue with randoms in a heated thread about a lighthearted topic. Now ChatGPT has earned a permanent spot among my two-page grouping of apps (seeing people with four to five pages full of useless apps drives me insane!).
But while I was messing around with ChatGPT, I got the urge to fill out the rest of my second home page with some additional apps. This time, I wanted to enter the world of productivity apps and find the best ones that renew my focus, develop long-term habits that benefit me in many ways and handle a bunch of other everyday actions!
My journey to download the top productivity apps led to my iPhone becoming a whole lot more useful in several areas of my personal and professional life.
The productivity apps that will never leave my home screen
Once I asked ChatGPT to lead me down the digital road to all the apps that cater to boosting one’s productivity, it gave me a slew of obvious choices. The pre-installed Notes app (which I type something new into every time I get a bright idea or want to compile upcoming gaming releases) and Shortcuts app (which cooks up custom automations that handle an assortment of tasks across other apps and Siri) got top billing among the chatbot’s picks.
Then it picked out a bunch of other apps that fill specific roles, such as Todoist for task management, Notion for notes & knowledge management, Fantastical for calendar scheduling, Superhuman Email for inbox management and PDF Expert for annotating & managing PDFs.
As for the ones that stood out to me, these are the three productivity apps that now take up the space they deserve on my iPhone:
- Forest: This app gamifies the act of creating focus sessions and building positive habits by creating “trees” and calm soundscapes every time you reach a milestone. Open another app that’s clearly a distraction (you can count any social media app among that group) and you’ll kill a tree in your virtual forest. I get a kick out of splitting my time between different activities, putting up blockers for certain apps during time periods, observing my focus statistics, getting exposed to digital wellbeing tools, and getting notified about real tree planting through my accomplishments.
- Readwise Reader: Since my days usually consist of reading a bunch of articles and saving some of them as bookmarks in my browser that I always forget to go back to, this recommended pick got rid of that bad habit by letting me make it my permanent “read-it later” app. It’s easy to drop in an article I need for future reference, use the text-to-speech feature if I’m in the mood to hear it read out to me and highlight certain sections that I need to access quickly instead of thumbing through it in a rush to locate them. It also feels good being able to categorize books, emails, PDFs and Tweets for quick access for article inclusion or when I just want to pick up where I left off during a lengthy reading session.
- Day One: I’ve gotten more into journaling these days since my cinematic dreams force me to start jotting down everything I can remember about them once I wake up. Then there are those moments where my laptop is off, I get a bright idea and proceed to start furiously typing out everything before it leaves my brain. I’ve begun using this journaling app instead of throwing all of my random thoughts into the Notes app. What makes Day One stand out to me is how it lets you attach photos, attach audio, track the days you’ve done your journaling and get suggestions on what I should write about based on what I’ve been doing lately. Using this app as both a way to save my inner thoughts and write out my concepts for articles has come in clutch for me.
The takeaway
ChatGPT laid out a wide range of productivity apps that are similar to the ones that now take up valuable home screen space and time on my iPhone: Opal, Focus To-Do and One Sec are comparable to Forest. Instapaper and Pocket handle similar tasks just like Readwise Reader. Then there’s Streaks and HabitKit, which track your habits just like Day One.
My iPhone is less of a miniature distraction gadget and more of a positive habit-building machine, thanks to ChatGPT’s worthwhile endorsements of the best productivity apps.
Have you experimented with any of these apps yourself? Let me know how you got on in the comments below.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Subscribe to Tom's Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok.
More from Tom’s Guide
- I stopped doomscrolling for 48 Hours and let ChatGPT do the catching up — and it worked much better than expected
- OpenAI is shutting down its AI browser — here's how to get its best features in Google Chrome
- Someone created a 'Ghost Font' that humans can read but AI can't — I had to try it for myself
