Entrepreneurs and small business owners are some of the busiest people in the world. Growing or scaling a company takes an immense amount of work, and too often, business owners are trying to make all this happen with limited or no support.

If you feel like you’re wearing too many hats and that you spend most of your days putting out fires or trying to find the time to hit deadlines, you’re not alone.

So, before we share our list of the nine killer organization and productivity apps, let's explore why you need a little more organization in your business life and beyond.

The importance of organization for business success

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are under incredible amounts of pressure. A recent study by the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) showed that cash flow, economic instability, and retaining top talent were the top three concerns for entrepreneurs. But that’s just the start. Another huge issue that many entrepreneurs face is that they need to be competent in so many different skills.

We surveyed hundreds of small business managers last year and found that, on average, they spent over one-third of their time on small administrative tasks. When you consider other important tasks like meeting clients, managing staff, and providing services, it’s a surprise that entrepreneurs have any time left to grow their businesses. Indeed, some of them don’t.

In an interesting paper called Is organizational skill a will or a way to a successful lifestyle and workstyle? (Bratu, 2021), the author outlines the coordinates of organizations as time management, planning, and goal setting. Strong organizational skills are the antidote to feeling overwhelmed by work, taking care of your mental health, and reaching your potential.

See: The Big Price Of Small Tasks: How Entrepreneurs May Be Unwittingly Keeping Their Businesses Small, Hurting Bottom Lines And Compromising Wellbeing

How great organization skills impact your business

• An oft-cited McKinsey report suggests that workers spend almost 2 hours a day finding information. An organized business cuts out this wasted time.
• Organized leaders and business owners develop efficient workflows and adopt time-saving automation, which boosts productivity.
• Organization helps you see things clearly. When you have proper visibility over resources and tasks, you can make better strategic decisions.
• Disorganized businesses miss deadlines and deals, get sidetracked, and blow promising opportunities.

How good organization boosts growth

• Solid organization keeps you in control and helps you prioritize and schedule your tasks.
• Clutter and disorganization are bad for stress. Remove them from your life, and you’ll improve your mental health.
• Proper planning means efficient resource utilization and less waste.

When you combine these benefits together, you create the optimal conditions for business growth.

The costs of poor organization

• Missed deadlines lead to missed opportunities and can cause damage to your business's reputation.
• Poor organization can hurt revenue through missed sales or slower sales cycles.
• Badly run businesses waste resources and time through inefficiency.
• Poor record-keeping can lead to fines or costly legal disputes.

Ok, now that you understand the impact that a good organization can make on your business, let’s look at nine digital tools that can help you hit your groove.

The best organization and productivity apps of 2024

Here are the best productivity apps and digital tools to help your organization, focus, time management, and more.

Amazing Marvin

Amazing Marvin is one of the most loved task management and productivity tools out there, and for good reason!

It’s gained a solid reputation in the neurodivergent community thanks to its simplicity, ease-of-use, and highly customizable suite of features and functions, including procrastination warnings, "reward" tasks, "beat the clock" challenges, a "task jar" for those times when you're stuck on what to do next, and "eat the frog" labels, to name but a few.

But of course, it's not just neurodivergent folk who can benefit from these features. Amazing Marvin is a fantastic tool for anyone who wants to tackle procrastination, stay on track, and get more done each day.

Best features:

• The widest range of features for any personal productivity app currently on the market
• Its powerful customization options allow you to create a unique system that works for you. It also offers dozens of workflow templates to jump straight into
• Despite all its features, its clean and minimal design helps to avoid overwhelm and distraction
• The habit-building features are really strong, making Amazing Marvin perfect for people who need accountability.

Pricing: $12 per month (monthly billing) or $8 per month (annual billing) after a 30-day free trial.

TickTick

More than just a to-do list app, TickTick is designed to make your life easier by helping you stay focused on your tasks, rather than just keeping a list of them.

Once you've planned your day or week, TickTick's Pomodoro function helps you estimate how long each task will take and then uses Pomodoro sprints to track how long each task actually takes.

Not only that, it rewards you by celebrating little achievements along the way. Plus, it gives you helpful insights into your task habits through its statistics dashboard, so you can work smarter.

Best features:

• User-friendly interface and highly intuitive task management options
• You can set smart reminders based on time or even your location
• Built-in Pomodoro timer and Eisenhower matrix
• Daily summary generated at the end of each day to track your progress.

Pricing: Free with limited features, premium version is $27.99 per year.

Sunsama

Sunsama is a great digital planner app for those who need to balance a little more structure in their lives, without the stress.

Every day, Sunsama encourages you to take a moment and plan your day properly, guiding you through each step of its process. After you're done planning, it shows you how much time you've allocated for work, warns you if you're trying to do too much, and supports you in moving tasks over to the next day if possible.

This is especially important for business owners who might feel pressured to try and tackle as much as possible each day. Sunsama reassures you that it's okay to prioritize and pace yourself.

You can also set weekly objectives and align tasks accordingly, keeping your ultimate goal in mind as you work through your week.

Sunsama also offers regular suggestions to help you optimize your workflow and even tells you when it’s time to wrap up for the day to help you steer clear of burnout.

Best features:

• Daily planning prompts
• Seamlessly integrates with your calendar and lets you drag and drop events to build your schedule
• Working in Focus mode automatically starts tracking the time you are spending on a task
• Novel calendar and task view feature to build your schedule.

Pricing: $20 per month.

Focus@Will

If you’re the type of person who gets easily derailed by distractions, Focus@Will could be the game-changer you need.

Used by teams at Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and SpaceX, it’s a great tool that promises to help you get into a flow state with the power of music. But not just any music!

Focus@Will's team of neuroscientists, musicologists, and platinum-selling music producers take the findings of seven years of research into cognition, mood, and focus to create its diverse audio library specifically to help your mind avoid distraction and boredom.

The result? Up to a staggering 200-400% increase in your focus time!

Best features:

• Vast library of unique tracks scientifically designed to help eliminate distractions
• Music dynamically changes according to your behavior
• Useful monitoring tools that provide interesting work pattern insights.

Pricing: $7.49 per month.

See: Playlists For Productivity: How Does Music Affect Your Focus?

SimpleMind

SimpleMind is a well-designed and intuitive mind-mapping app. It’s one of the best digital tools for brainstorming and visual organization. The premise is simple and familiar if you’ve used other brainstorming tools. Essentially, you have a central concept from which you can branch out with text, links, images, and so on.

The design is very good and allows for a fair degree of customization. What's more, you can cross-link mind maps, and there is a great search function. It’s a great way to declutter your mind and helps with memory problems. In other words, it’s an essential task management tool that enables you to break down complex subjects.

Best features:

• Smooth and uncluttered interface for creating mind maps
• Available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android
• A quality search function that makes finding ideas and notes very straightforward.

Pricing: Free version available, Pro version starts at $10.99 for the mobile apps.

Dwellingright

As business owners, all the repetitive tasks and responsibilities we have to deal with don't start and end at our office doors. There's a whole host of personal tasks and life admin that's needed to keep our home lives running smoothly.

That's where Dwellingright comes in extremely handy.

This personal organizer app not only helps you stay on top of your to-do list, it allows you to share and clearly allocate responsibilities to others. No more back-and-forth messages, no more reminders written on the back of your hand, no more crossed wires.

And of course, it's not just the tasks themselves that can fall by the wayside. Dwellingright also stores essential documents related to your tasks, like insurance forms, receipts, contracts, warranties, and so on.

One of its most stand-out features is its AI-driven task prediction system. It anticipates upcoming tasks, such as annual checkups or document renewals, and notifies you in advance so that nothing sneaks up on you or falls through the cracks.

Best features:

• Superb tool for business owners with ADHD
• Excellent routine prediction notifications to help you stay on top of tasks
• A great option for delegating tasks.

Pricing: Free for Android and iOS.

Grain

How many times have you hastily scribbled notes in a meeting to make sure no ideas or actions get forgotten? More to the point, how often do you find yourself scratching your head in confusion trying to decipher your own handwriting or find crucial details that are missing?

Grain is a novel app built for anyone who attends or holds a lot of meetings. When you’re in a meeting, you want to stay engaged and in the moment. However, remembering everything that is decided can be a challenge. Grain solves this issue through intelligent transcription that tracks and catalogs what was said and decided.

Grain is more than just a meeting recorder. It also interprets your conversations and picks out the important parts, building concise but useful summaries of each meeting. From there, it creates a list of actionable items, which helps you track and action each point. Interestingly, it then creates a searchable database to quickly find and identify key information.

It’s great for remote work, team collaborations, and even personal productivity. By centralizing all your information, you can improve your decision-making, follow through on actions, and chase up on them.

Best features:

• Real-time video and audio recording capabilities
• Smart summaries of key moments from meetings
• Tracks key decisions and pivotal points from meetings, helping teams follow up on actions.

Pricing: Starts from $15 per month.

Routinery

Whether you're running a busy business or just trying to stay organized at home, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you have so much to do. Sometimes, all you need is a few tweaks to your daily habits, and Routinery makes this simple.

As the name suggests, this mobile app helps you build productive routines and habits. With Routinery, you can design step-by-step routines for any part of your day. Each task has a built-in timer to help you understand how long each task takes. Plus, the app sends reminders to keep you focused and on track.

Best features:

• Easy-to-use tools for creating routines
• Handy timer to track each habit
• Functional progress-tracking to see how your habits are improving over time.

Pricing: Starts at $4.99 per month.

Freaky Alarm

Speaking of routines, if your mornings are usually a chaotic rush because you can never win the battle against your alarm, you'll need something that helps you start your day exactly when you plan to.

Freaky Alarm is an alarm clock app with a difference! Instead of hitting the snooze button or turning off your alarm and going straight back to sleep, Freaky Alarm makes you complete mental or physical tasks to turn off the alarm, making sure you break out of your slumber and start your day.

Not only that, but Freaky Alarm also lets you track your performance to see which days are your biggest struggles to wake up. It also facilitates adding to-do reminders to your alarm for extra motivation.

Best features:

• Provides an array of different tasks like puzzles, memory games, or photo matching
• QR or barcode challenges are a great way to force you out of your bed and into another room in the house
• Great customization options and genuinely horrible alarm sounds that will work for even the deepest sleepers.

Pricing: $1.99.

What's the bottom line?

Disorganization is a real issue for entrepreneurs. With so many things to take care of, it’s all too easy to put things off or let them fall through the cracks.

Thankfully, there is a exciting new generation of apps that are built to maximize your productivity and focus, build and sustain healthy routines, and even get the deepest sleepers out of bed in the morning.