Personal productivity tools help individuals stay focused, manage distractions, and optimise their workflow for better efficiency and time management.
For B2B marketers with 3+ years experience
Join the 12-week B2B Growth Programme for marketers who want a compound, repeatable path to stronger pipeline without hiring more staff.
45min
video course
Understand the full growth engine in 45 minutes and spot the levers you can pull tomorrow.
I test every tool myself before recommending it. Some links are affiliate links—if you buy, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.
Knowledge work is a juggling act of ideas, deadlines, and interruptions. The right tool cuts the noise, captures next actions before they slip away, and turns scattered notes into organised plans.
I have tested dozens of apps while supporting growth teams that turn over between €100 k and €2 m a month. The best ones disappear into the background, sync across every device, and integrate with the software you already use.
This guide highlights the three products I reach for first, lists the features that actually matter, and then maps common use-case clusters so you can choose the right fit for your own workflow.
The grid alongside this text shows Todoist, Freedom, and Toggl. They combine speed, cross-platform coverage, and fair pricing. Each one can start as a single-purpose helper and expand only if you need extra power.
ChatGPT is an AI-powered conversational assistant designed to enhance productivity, automate workflows, and generate content effortlessly.
MacWhisper is an AI-driven audio transcription tool designed for Mac users, offering high-speed, offline speech-to-text conversion.
Notion is a flexible all-in-one workspace for organising tasks, projects, and documents, making it ideal for teams that need both project management and knowledge sharing.
An idea should move from brain to inbox with one keystroke or voice command. Fast capture reduces mental load and keeps the tool in daily use.
Desktop, browser, and phone apps must stay aligned in real time. Switching devices should never mean wondering which list is correct.
List, board, or calendar layouts let you spot deadlines at a glance. Filters and labels keep long lists manageable without forcing complex setups.
Distraction blockers, scheduled do-not-disturb windows, or one-click focus modes protect deep-work hours from chat pings and social media loops.
Basic charts showing tasks completed, time spent, or streaks help you spot bottlenecks and celebrate wins without exporting data to a spreadsheet.
Native links to email, calendars, and chat tools shorten context switching. At a minimum, look for a Zapier or Make connector in case a direct integration is missing.
Most tools charge per user or per project. Check that paid tiers unlock features you genuinely need and that costs will not jump sharply as your workload grows.
Speed is the currency of growth work. When a campaign idea strikes, I want it in market before the competition reaches its daily stand-up. Voice-to-text transcription trims meeting admin to almost nothing: I record, auto-transcribe, and paste key actions straight into my notes without touching a keyboard. The same principle applies to research; an AI chat assistant drafts first-pass content, rewrites subject lines, and even sanity-checks SQL snippets while I stay in the flow.
Automation pushes that pace further. The moment a lead magnet form fires, it can enrich the contact, score intent, and slot the record into a nurture sequence—all triggered by one background rule. No engineer, no backlog ticket, just instant follow-through. Password managers also shave minutes off every login and free the brain from remembering arcane credentials; that cognitive space is better spent on messaging experiments, not on remembering which special character still satisfies outdated security rules.
Fast tools share a trait: they reduce friction rather than add features. Each one removes a manual step or cuts the time between thought and outcome. Stack a few together and you reclaim hours every week—hours you can reinvest in testing channels, refining offers, or simply thinking more deeply about the next growth lever.
LastPass is a secure password manager that stores and auto-fills login credentials across multiple devices.
MacWhisper is an AI-driven audio transcription tool designed for Mac users, offering high-speed, offline speech-to-text conversion.
ChatGPT is an AI-powered conversational assistant designed to enhance productivity, automate workflows, and generate content effortlessly.
Zapier is the leading no-code automation platform that connects apps and services to automate repetitive tasks without coding.
Moving quickly is pointless if half the day disappears into notifications and inbox refreshes. I block entire sites, mute Slack channels, and funnel non-critical e-mails into a daily batch so that deep-work blocks stay sacred. A hard stop on social feeds forces me to ship content before I consume it; the habit alone doubles weekly output.
Inbox plugins are another safeguard. They hide the unread count, delay new-mail badges, and surface only messages older than a preset window. That simple tweak removes the dopamine loop of checking for anything “urgent” every five minutes. The result is a calmer mind and clearer priorities when I do open the inbox.
The final layer is scheduled quiet hours across devices. Calendar focus events, coupled with auto-responders that state when I will reply, set expectations for colleagues and clients. Pushback is rare; most people respect the boundary when they know a response time in advance. The side benefit is fewer context switches, so each task finishes faster and at higher quality.
Freedom is a distraction-blocking tool that helps users stay focused by restricting access to websites, apps, and notifications.
Inbox When Ready is a browser extension that helps users control email interruptions by hiding their inbox until they’re ready to check it.
SaneBox is an AI-powered email filtering tool that helps prioritise important emails and reduce inbox clutter.
Growth roles throw up a barrage of to-dos: update landing pages, brief PPC tweaks, chase a lost lead in the CRM, read that new case study. A lightweight task system catches every input and lets me triage in seconds. I jot an item, tag it by urgency and area—product, acquisition, retention—and move on. When planning the week, I filter for high-impact actions and block time slots to match.
Visual boards help when work crosses into light collaboration. Dragging a card from “Next” to “Live” makes progress visible to stakeholders without another status meeting. If a task involves multiple steps—copy, design, dev hand-off—I nest check-boxes inside the card so nothing slips.
Recurring tasks round out the setup. Weekly metric reviews, monthly churn deep-dives, and quarterly pricing audits trigger automatically, so strategic routines never rely on memory. The system is deliberately simple: if overhead creeps in, adoption falls and tasks drift back to sticky notes. For anything heavier—multiple teammates, shared dependencies—I graduate the item to a full project management tool and keep the personal list clean.
Notion is a flexible all-in-one workspace for organising tasks, projects, and documents, making it ideal for teams that need both project management and knowledge sharing.
Airtable is a no-code relational database and collaboration tool that combines the flexibility of spreadsheets with powerful automation and integrations.
Trello is a simple, intuitive Kanban-based project management tool that helps teams organise tasks visually.
Stay organised and track tasks with Todoist, an intuitive tool for managing personal and professional to-dos.
Asana is a structured project management tool designed for teams that need clear workflows, task dependencies, and detailed progress tracking.
Fireflies.ai is an AI-powered meeting assistant that transcribes, summarises, and organises conversations for improved productivity.
Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine and research assistant that provides accurate, sourced answers to complex queries in real-time.
MacWhisper is an AI-driven audio transcription tool designed for Mac users, offering high-speed, offline speech-to-text conversion.
Notebook LM is an AI-powered research tool that summarises and organises information from documents, notes, and web sources.
SaneBox is an AI-powered email filtering tool that helps prioritise important emails and reduce inbox clutter.
Toggl is a time-tracking tool designed for freelancers and teams to monitor productivity and billable hours effortlessly.
Stay organised and track tasks with Todoist, an intuitive tool for managing personal and professional to-dos.
Process Street is a no-code workflow automation tool that helps businesses document, manage, and optimise recurring processes.
Inbox When Ready is a browser extension that helps users control email interruptions by hiding their inbox until they’re ready to check it.
LastPass is a secure password manager that stores and auto-fills login credentials across multiple devices.
Freedom is a distraction-blocking tool that helps users stay focused by restricting access to websites, apps, and notifications.
ChatGPT is an AI-powered conversational assistant designed to enhance productivity, automate workflows, and generate content effortlessly.
Automate repetitive tasks and streamline processes with powerful workflow tools. Reduce manual work, improve efficiency, and create scalable automations that keep your business running smoothly.
Read tool guide
A digital workspace lets teams ship faster and hunt for information less. This guide compares the front-runners and shows which setup suits your stage of growth.
Read tool guide
Collaboration and feedback tools help teams brainstorm, review work, and share input efficiently, making teamwork smoother and more productive.
Read tool guide
Pick the project-management platform that keeps every task, timeline, and teammate aligned so your campaigns launch on time and nothing slips through the cracks.
Read tool guide
Focused, uninterrupted time for cognitively demanding tasks.
Prioritise tasks effectively using the Eisenhower decision-making matrix.
The process of ranking tasks or goals by importance and urgency.
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I’ve helped B2B service companies scale — not with random tactics, but with clear systems that align marketing and sales into one predictable growth engine. Built on 15 years of hands-on experience — helping teams move from random tactics to repeatable, scalable results.
15 years experience
1,500 marketers trained since 2015
Exited 6 companies
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Anything that speeds up how I capture ideas, set priorities, or block distractions earns the label. This ranges from a plain task list that keeps the day on track to an AI chatbot that drafts e-mails while I focus on strategy. The common thread is immediacy: a good tool lets me act the moment a thought appears rather than adding another admin step.
A basic workflow helps, but it does not have to be perfect. I start with one habit I can stick to—writing every incoming task in the same place—then add tooling that makes that habit effortless. Trying to design an end-to-end system first usually leads to whiteboard paralysis. Ship a simple loop, refine once it survives a busy week.
Count the minutes saved. If the premium tier cuts ten minutes a day of manual work, it pays for itself quickly. For example, automatic transcription removes note-taking from calls and frees my attention for client nuance. I trial the paid tier for a fortnight, measure time saved, and only keep it if the calendar highlights a clear win.
Every new app promises speed but each login also adds cognitive load. I limit myself to one tool per job: one task manager, one focus blocker, one AI helper. When a new product claims to replace an existing favourite, I spend a week using it exclusively. If I find myself switching back mid-week, the newcomer is uninstalled.
They confuse collaboration with personal workflow. A shared project board is vital, yet individual focus habits need space to breathe. I keep my personal task manager private and push only key milestones to the team board. That separation lets me triage my day without the noise of every team notification and still keeps stakeholders updated on real progress.
Personal productivity tools are best viewed as accelerators, not crutches. Choose one you can master in an afternoon, measure the time it genuinely returns, and revisit the stack quarterly to prune anything that no longer earns its keep.
Understand the full growth engine in 45 minutes and spot the levers you can pull tomorrow.
45 min
English
English, Dutch
Join the 12-week B2B Growth Programme for marketers who want a compound, repeatable path to stronger pipeline without hiring more staff.
See 12-week outline
For B2B marketers with 3+ years experience
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