Remember the good old days when your desktop—the wooden kind, not the electronic kind!—was covered with all of your favorite tools of the trade? Your best pen, a calculator, a thesaurus, and a rotary phone to call your best colleagues and contacts? Well, now everything you need is truly at your fingertips…and inside your phone. New apps pop up all the time, but today, here are the best apps available to make your professional and personal life smooth, organized, and fulfilling:
Vert – Traveling abroad and need to know how many Euros you can buy for 100 US dollars? Not sure how many liquid ounces are in a liter? Download the Vert app and every measurement and literally every possible conversion will be at your fingertips.
Waze – GoogleMaps will get you there but Waze will get you there faster and help you avoid accidents and traffic jams. The directions are spot-on and updates happen in real time. Stay plugged in though; this app drains your battery in a hurry.
Kayak – Another great travel app, Kayak allows you to search for the best price on everything travel without having to hop from site to site. Great hotels, flights, and even vacation packages are compared side by side with just a few clicks or scrolls.
Venmo – Gone are the days when friends need to do math at the dinner table or hassle servers with multiple bills. Now, one person can pay the bill and everyone else can use the Venmo app to instantly contribute their share. Pay babysitters, contractors, or small business owners without either party paying a credit card fee or worrying about carrying cash.
LinkedIn – While traditional resumes are still the standard, more and more people find contacts, apply for jobs, and build their professional brands using LinkedIn. Post published articles and connect with peers and create a real-life network using this virtual tool.
Google Keep – Already use Gmail and Google Calendar and like the way they look and feel? Google Keep has the same vibe while providing a mechanism to capture voice memos, texts, and lists and display them in a familiar way. Share your documents and collaborate with friends and colleagues using Keep as well.
Wally – We’re all really good at spending money with our phones—online shopping, Apple Pay, automatic utility bill payments—but now there is a tool at your disposal to help be more responsible with your money. Wally helps you set a budget, categorize expenses, save receipts, and even export data to Excel to manipulate further.
TED – When you’ve balanced your budget, booked your trip, and found the job of your dreams, sit back and relax and turn on a TED talk. More than 1,700 videos and audios are available to educate, entertain, enlighten and make you laugh. Log in and broaden your mind.
