18 Apps That Help You Take Back Your Day

There’s an old joke: The best thing about having your own business is that you get to work half-days—and you get to pick those 12 hours. Looking for ways to take back your day? There exists an array of apps that can preserve efficiency and save your time. Check out the following short list.

Track expenses easily

If you want to hear a road warrior sigh, watch him take a fist full of crumbled receipts from his pocket that need to be invoiced. Expense tracking apps Abukai Expenses and Expensify take the irritation out of the chore. You can use the dual pixel CMOS 5MP camera on the Galaxy S7 to snap of photo of a receipt and automatically extract the information from it and create an expense report.

Manage passwords security

Do you feel like you lose half a day requesting hints for all the passwords you’ve forgotten? Password manager software likeDashlane and Lastpass will automatically generate distinct, hard-to-crack passwords (no more easy-to-guess “123456” or “Qwerty) and remember them for you.

Streamline signing

You shouldn’t be printing, signing and scanning documents in 2016.SignEasy and SignMyPad are two apps that allow you to sign and fill in NDAs, purchase orders, loan agreements and other important documents securely from your Samsung Galaxy Note5 and other devices. Going paperless is green and productive.

Track your contacts

Do you spend more time looking for your contacts’ information than communicating with them? CircleBack monitors social networks for any changes in job title, roles and more. FullContact pulls together all your contacts from your social media and address book, eliminates redundant entries and adds their social media photos. You can even see your contact’s recent Tweets and Instagram posts, giving you some conversation starters. PureContact uses a different approach—providing information from only your most frequently accessed friends, family and contacts.

Monitor social feedback

If you write a blog, it can be daunting to constantly generate new ideas. BuzzSumo lets you discover the most shared content across social media, giving you insight on what topics people care about at any given moment. You can get an immediate alert when an article comes out mentioning a key word that’s important to you or if a competitor’s post is rocking the Internet. Perch collects social media content from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Yelp and other sites on one screen, giving you an easy way to “spy” on your competition. You can also be pinged on your Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge if, say, someone posts a review about you on Yelp, letting you monitor your social profile. It’s a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of the web without spending all day in front of a computer screen.

Coordinate devices

Coordinating the information that you have across many devices can be a time drag. The Galaxy Tab S2, the world’s thinnest tablet, includes a proprietary feature called SideSync, which lets you share the screen and data between your tablet and your phone or computer. For example, you can insert photos from your tablet to Microsoft Word documents on your PC, eliminating delays in putting together an important presentation.

Pay with your phone

Plastic is passé. Rather than fumble around with credit cards or cash, you can get through checkout safety and quickly with Samsung Pay, a mobile payment service that works with the latest Samsung Galaxy smartphones. You just swipe up from the home page on your device, scan your fingerprint or enter a pin, and hover your device over the in-store card reader. The service works in more stores than any other mobile payment service, so it’s a great offering for your customers too.

Get a personal assistant

Intelligent virtual assistant is a new category of software that isgrowing at a blistering pace. 24me automatically generates reminders so you never miss a meeting or forget a bill. With the tap of a button, you can pay bills or have a real-life assistant handle an important task. It can even sync with other apps such as Facebook to wish employees and customers a happy birthday if you forget. Quip is a productivity suite that lets you share documents, chat, produce real-time checklists, compile grocery lists and do countless other tasks.Wunderlist is another do it-all collaborative productivity app that helps you tick off all your personal and professional to-dos, from managing a project to planning a holiday.

Prioritize tasks

The typical small business owner has a daily to-do list that goes on for weeks and weeks. Priority Matrix divides your tasks into four categories: “This is your inbox; store everything,”
“Urgent but can be delegated,” “Critical, but not urgent” and “Critical—DO NOW.” You can also use it to monitor if your employees are spending their time wisely. Asana, another to-do listing app, provides updates about what’s been done. Such apps help make sure you’re focusing on the most important things, rather than sweating the small stuff, which is the greatest time saver of all.