The Best Productivity Apps (2026)

When you lead a busy lifestyle, making the most of your time is vital. It can be easy to get distracted, stay focused and work productively; even in daily life tasks. Designed to help you complete jobs in a smarter and faster way, these apps are our top picks to streamline your personal and work checklists directly from your phone.

Spark Mail

Available on: Android and iOS
Price: Free (premium subscription available)

If sorting through emails is a huge part of your daily routine, we highly recommend Spark Mail. With its sleek, easy-to-navigate design and useful AI features, making the switch from your regular inbox is easy.

Intelligent notifications mean Spark will only notify you about the most important messages in your inbox, meaning you can focus on your day-to-day without being bombarded with hundreds of alerts. You can separate your personal emails and work emails too, so you can keep everything in one place.

Spark is particularly useful for the workplace. You can create email templates for standardised emails, delegate emails that are awaiting a response to a specific colleague, and even craft emails together directly within the app. Spark's chat feature is particularly handy, enabling your team to discuss the content of the email while viewing it in real time.

Forest

Available on: Android and iOS
Price: Free (premium subscription available)

Struggle to stay focused ahead of exams? Forest is refreshingly different from many other productivity apps on this list, as it’s specifically designed to help you with your study and keep your hands off your phone when the mind starts to wander.

Instead of scrolling through social media or messaging your friends when you should really be completing a task, Forest motivates you to stay focused in a brilliant way. When you open the app, you'll be asked to plant a virtual tree, which will finish growing after the countdown you set is over. Each virtual tree you grow will be added to your virtual forest, and you'll earn coins in the process. If you exit the app during the countdown (to check Instagram, for example), your tree will die - and you won't receive any coins. When you reach 2,500 coins, you'll have the opportunity to plant a real tree with the app's tree-planting partner.

Forest works with Trees for the Future to plant new trees across five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. You stay focused, while a new tree is given a chance to flourish somewhere in the world. To plant a tree, you simply need to reach the 2,500 coins target, tap 'Real Forest' on the app, and then tap 'Plant' - it’s that easy.

There are a handful of tools packed into Forest that we found useful for blocking out distractions. The Personalised Allowlist feature locks apps like social media while you’re studying, so you’re not getting bombarded with notifications. You can also set a Time Guard that encourages you to stay off your phone when in a study session.

Todoist

Available on: Android and iOS
Price: Free (premium subscription available)

We love a to-do list, and Todoist has been specifically created around that core idea. It's the app’s appealing design and innovative features that help it stand out from the rest.

When it comes to adding and completing a new task, there's much more to Todoist than making a simple list. Subtasks can be set when one of your tasks requires multiple steps to reach completion, and you can add as many subtasks as you please. Progress is tracked in the Productivity View where you can see your goals and be awarded Karma points for hitting them.

For £4 per month, you can benefit from even more productivity features with Todoist Pro. Extra benefits include being able to manage 300 projects simultaneously, automatic alerts and custom filters.

GoodNotes

Available on: Android and iOS
Price: Free (premium subscription available)

One of our favourite digital notebook apps, GoodNotes – a Google Play Best of 2025 award-winner - feels like you're writing on paper. As well as typing out notes, you can use a supported stylus or your finger to write, annotate or draw whatever you please. You can even sketch diagrams or annotate existing documents like PDFs.

This emphasis on tangible note-taking really sets GoodNotes apart. There are new and improved smart pen gestures, including a circle-to-lasso tool to help you resize, rotate and rearrange your notes and images, as well as a scribble-to-erase feature. You can drag and drop text, documents, images and screenshots into the app, and pretty much everything is searchable - even your handwritten notes. The whiteboard feature is great for sprawling brainstorms, too.

HabitBox

Available on: Android and iOS
Price: Free (premium subscription available)

If success for you is based on consistency, then HabitBox is one of the best productivity apps out there. This app helps you track habits, hit targets, and track your streaks at the touch of a button. Whether you want to hit your water intake goal or keep track of gym progress, HabitBox will give you feedback and motivation to keep up the good work.

The Calendar heat map gives you an overview of your progress, and it’s fully customisable so you can see your most productive days and habit patterns.