Productivity Applications

In this modern day and age, we live and work in a world that has accelerated the expectation of how quickly we respond to one another.  I believe this is due to the introduction of the smart phone into the business world.  The expectation is that we get a lot done in a very short amount of time.  Life is in fast forward now, and we can either get with the times or become more in touch with the digital world that we live in, or be left in the dust, wondering what were missing.   Really the expectation is that you could be contacted at any given time.  Text email, Facebook, twitter and all of the se other social media outlets that we al use to communicating with one another, can be very overwhelming.  We used to use a filing cabinet to organize our important documents, but now, everything is digital, so we have become dependent on having everything we need at our finger tips at all times.  The need for productivity applications has become very apparent.

Whether you are filtering mass amounts of content, managing a project or professionally presenting a company, community managers deal with a lot of communication. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources to keep them productive.        

                                            

Shared docs, e-mail and internal micro blogging are great work, but combine all these and more in the social work platform, Podio, which allows for a wide range of project management and collaboration methods. It has an easy drag-and-drop interface for customization, along with a slick mobile app.

Tweet deck and Hoot Suite allow me to schedule my tweets for later, and gives me the ability to manage multiple social media accounts.

Screenr is a free way to record your screen for up to five minutes, for tutorials, demonstrations etc.
Time is such a valuable thing to us now, especially in out hectic lives that often blend both our personal live s with our work. There are many applications out on the market now that aim to make our work easier and us more productive. If there's a job that needs to be done, a simple download of a productivity app will help you do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. 

Discussion questions:
 
Do you think that all of these productivity applications that are out there, are actually making us more efficient or are they just complicating things even more?

Do you think that it is fair that because the majority of people have the technology, that we are now expected to respond to everyone right away?

For curiosity sake, is there a productivity application that you use? What is it, and how does it help you?