My Favourite iPad Productivity Apps (2021) By Ali Abdaal

Hey friends welcome back to the channel today we're talking through my top 10 productivity apps for the iPad. Let's get into it number 10 on the list, we've got the app unread now unread is a RSS feed reader for the iPad. What is a RSS feed? Well, if you follow blogs like I do, then they all have. This thing called a RSS feed attached to them and if you want you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the blog it's sort of like subscribing to their email newsletter, and so anytime, a new blog post gets released on the blog you get like an update in your RSS feed. This is good because you can use an app called feebly like I do to subscribe to these RSS feeds, and then you can use the app unread on the iPad or reader on macOS and on iPhone to then read your feebly stuff. So basically, what this means is that any blog that I like I can, it's like.

I'm getting a daily digest of all the stuff that they're publishing one of the cool things about feebly is that you can categorize the blogs that you're subscribed to in two different categories. So I've got creator design, doctors, fans, friends, management, ethics, minimalism, newsletters, product productivity. And then, if you click on one of those categories, you can see updates from all the blogs that you follow. So, for example, on cal Newport's, blog study, hacks we've got David Melinda's productivity, productive lack of productivity, which is a blog post that I can read and then, when I'm done with it, I can just swipe up, and it'll. Take me to the next one, and this is on Tim Ferriss, or I can swipe to the side.

And then I can just kind of go through and decide which blog posts I actually want to read, and this is a great way of keeping in touch with the blogs that I want to follow without my email inbox being inundated by subscribing to their newsletters. The other cool thing about unread is that, if you're on a blog post- and you don't want to read it right now- I can swipe to the side, and that gives me the option to read it later or as I prefer to do to share it into another app which is instar paper and installer. Is my ninth favorite productivity app for the iPad, because installer is a great read it later app so essentially anytime. I stumble across an article on the internet or in my email or on red on the iPad. I just use the iOS share feature to share it into instar paper.

Now this is really useful, because now on installer, I have a digest of everything that I have saved onto it. So usually, if I come across an article on the internet, it's when I'm procrastinating from doing something, and I find that this improves my productivity, because then I'm not wasting time reading the article. If I actually don't want to read it, I just save it into instar paper, and I know it's going to be there for me when I next actually want to read it, and this is cool because since I've been using installer since june 2019, I've got all of my highlights for all my different articles saved here on the app. So if I go to the sidebar and I hit notes, it brings up all the highlights from everything. I've read that I've highlighted since the june 2019, so we've got loads of blog posts here, and so, if I want to revisit ideas that I've already saved in the past, I can do it on the app directly and even better installer, also syncs, with read-wise, which also syncs to notion, and so I've got.

My instar paper highlights in my notion database. So if, for example, I click on this article from Ryan holiday, how does it feel to get everything you wanted, which I read on November, the 8th 2020? I can look through my highlights of the article and, if I want, I can read the full article again, but I've got just my highlights saved here in notion if I ever need to access them again in position. Number eight we have the app drafts now draft is what I use for quick capturing. Any notes that I need to take on my iPad or on my iPhone or on my Mac or on my Apple Watch. It's very cross-platform.

It syncs seamlessly across all these different things, and it's basically just a very quick note-taking app and I prefer drafts to any other note-taking app just because of its speed and because it's got an Apple Watch widget, which means if I'm driving or if I'm walking- and I want to take a note. I can just tap the widget on the home screen of my Apple Watch, and then I can dictate whatever I want into it as I'm on the go, and then it'll automatically sync up with everything. So if, for example, I'm listening to a book on audible- and I want to sort of take note of something that that's happened or if I'm listening to a podcast episode, and I've got some thoughts on it, and I want to write something down- draft is my go-to app for this and ultimately, the stuff that I have in my drafting. Book ends up being saved either to notion or to Rome, depending on what personal use case. I've got for it, but I find that both notion and roam are too slow in terms of quick capture.

Everything goes into drafts if I need to take a note of it very quickly, and then it'll go on to one of these other apps, depending on how I'm using it moving on to number seven, we have a fantastic app called short form, which is what I've started using. I only discovered this a few weeks ago, and it's absolutely fantastic, so short form gives you perfect summaries of loads and loads of popular books. It's sort of like Blinkist, but I think it's a bit better than Blinkist, because Blinkist summaries of books are usually quite surface level, and you can get through them in like 20 minutes and that's fine if you want to get through a book in 20 minutes and if you want to, if you want to get these surface level insights. But the thing I like about short form is that the insides are a lot deeper than they are on any other app that I've seen. And so.

If, for example, I look at the summary for the righteous mind by Jonathan height, which was one of my favorite books of 2020 more in that video over there somewhere. All the books on short form, have a very detailed sort of one page summary. So you can get everything in a single page if you want, and the length of the one-page summary is very similar to Blinkist's kind of you know, 13 blinks, about a book, but the reason I like short forms so much is that they also have far more detailed, full summaries of every book on their library and so you've got. You know every basically, every chapter in the book will have its own detailed, summary, and they'll have exercises, and you can type stuff out for the different exercises. If you want to do the exercises yourself, and it's just a generally deeper way of going into a book summary now book summaries are not a substitute for actually reading the book, but given that we all have far too many books on our to be read list, and certainly I do as well.

I quite like reading the summary to decide an if I actually want to read the full book, and often I do or if I've read a book already then I'll. Look at the summary just to remind myself of the highlights, or in the third case a lot of books have one central idea, and then they just pad out the rest of the book for about 300 pages, because then it becomes a book and in that sense you don't really need to read the whole book to get the idea you can just read a summary. So short form is a fantastic app for that. I am in the process of trying to get a partnership with them. So if, by the time this video out, it's done, there will be a link or a coupon or an affiliate link in the video description, and you'll get some freebies.

If you click on it, maybe it won't, in which case I'll just put a link to the website, so yeah short form amazing app for book summaries coming in at point number six. We have the to-do list manager things three now things three is one of my favorite apps for the iPad and for iPhone, and I think it's got an Apple Watch widget as well and on Mac, mostly because it's just gorgeous and nice to use it's quite expensive, and it's iOS. Only and to be honest, you don't need a fancy to-do list manager to use to do this. Well, in fact, a lot of the time today. I use a paper to-do list.

This is the analog to-do list thing by monk link in the video description. If you want to check it out, it's like a cool sort of physical thing and a physical key card. But if I'm using a digital to-do list, then things three is the one that I normally use and the way things works is that it splits things up into three different hierarchies. So you've got areas, you've got projects, and then you've got tasks within those and so the way you can use areas, you could do it like health people, videos, business courses, writing, so you could have the different areas of your life. I used to organize my to-do list like that, but these days I tend to just organize it by project in order of priority and so, for example, the book that I'm writing is number one on the list and as you'll see, I've got these tasks to reach out to various people, um related to the book.

I've got this project that I want to do.30 days of meditation and I've got areas for my different team members, so that I can keep a rough track of what these guys are getting up to and the reason I like things three is that it just it's just nicely designed, and it's a pleasure to use and all the sort of animations and interactions are just like really nice, and when you take something off, it's a nice sort of like a nice little animation that takes it off for you, and it's just um like the most beautiful to-do list, app I've ever used, which is why I like it so much, and it's great, because they've got an iPad widget as well, and so I can just click on it, and I can see all the different things that I'm I'm trying to do today in position number five. We have the app notability, which is my favorite way of taking handwritten notes on the iPad Pro I've got a video up there, which is the one hit wonder that caused my channel to explode, called how I take notes on my iPad Pro in medical school. That goes in much more detail about exactly how I use notability to take handwritten notes. To be honest. These days, I don't take a lot of handwritten notes on the iPad.

If I'm taking handwritten notes, I use an actual pad pen pad or use my analog to do this thing. But the reason I like notability is because of its simplicity and because it kind of looks pretty and because of the way that it handles kind of Apple Pencil writing. So one of the issues that I have with good notes is that, if you're trying to write with the Apple Pencil, it doesn't quite feel like writing on paper, because it is the good notes, kind of smooths out your pencil strokes, which means you don't you feel like you're writing on a screen, whereas the nice thing about notability is that it genuinely feels like I'm, actually writing on paper and, of course, I've got the paper-like screen protector. On top of my iPad Pro I've been using the paperlike screen protector since 2018, and it's never let me down, and it's fantastic, so there'll be a link in the video description. If you want to check that out as well and that is sort of a matte screen protector, that means, if I'm writing, on the iPad.

It genuinely does sort of feel like writing on paper rather than writing on a shiny surface and the cool thing with notability is that you can import PDFs, and you can annotate stuff, and you can highlight things, and it's got like a search feature as well, where you can search through your handwritten text, which is kind of cool and yeah I've just been using notability for such a long time. I've got all my medical notes, my obstetrics and gynecology notes stuff from six men. My company YouTube channel related things, books, random PDFs of books that I've procured on the internet, um various things related to medicine, various things related to my part-time YouTuber academy. It's basically my go-to place for any handwritten notes that I need to take on the iPad in position number four. We have the app procreate now you might be wondering.

Why is this on my list of productivity, apps and the reason it's on my list of productivity apps is because I define productivity as making progress towards the goals that I find meaningful efficiently, while having fun along the way, and one of my goals for 2021 is to become a concept. Artist, I. e. to be able to illustrate scenes from some of my favorite fantasy books, and so with my art teacher Alessandro. We've been using procreate because, when we're on a Zoom call, I can share my screen on the iPad and I can kind of draw stuff.

And so recently the thing we've been working on is human anatomy. So, firstly, I'm doing an online course by promo. I think who I'm going to be interviewing on this channel at some point. An online course about gesture drawing that'll be linked in the video description. If you want to check it out and then with my art teacher Alessandro, we're working on things like human proportions and understanding the underlying anatomy, which is a good throwback to first-year anatomy revision and just trying to get to a point where I can competently draw people, because, like my dream for this concept, art is to be able to illustrate a scene from mist born, for example, where easier is like riding the winds, or you know a scene from the storm light archive where Saladin is holding his spear, and all of that needs a good knowledge of being able to draw people.

So that's what we've been using procreate for at point number: three. We have the app day, one, which is what I've been using since, like 2014 or something stupid like that. As my journaling app of choice and again day, one is amazing because it's beautifully designed, and it syncs across my Mac, my iPhone and my iPad, and so in my journal. I have 251 different entries now I don't use day one as often as I should, so you know I'm pretty. On and off with my journaling habits.

You'll see the blue sections here are the ones where I actually did some journaling, so I have periods of doing it quite regularly periods of not doing it very much at all. Oh, there was a period over here where I did it very regularly, but it's always really nice. Looking back through my journal from like three four years ago and being like, oh you know what was I thinking, what were my thoughts and feelings back then, and the other cool thing I do with day one is that I've got a special journal for nice comments, and so, if I get a really nice heartwarming comment from one of you guys on Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, I screenshot it on my phone usually, and I share it into my nice comments journal on day one, and so it was in 2017 that I first started putting myself out there, and you can see. These are the pink days when I posted a nice comment into the journal and the other cool thing about day. One is that for each journal you get a special private email address and so, for example, if I get a nice comment through email, all I have to do is forward the email to my special day, one email address, and then it will automatically get added to my nice comments journal, and so that's like a nice frictionless way of putting nice comments into my journal, so that if I'm having a bad day, I can read through some comments, and it can give me a little of a lift coming in at point number.

Two we have the Kindle app kindle is one of my most used apps on the iPad, because, even though I have a physical kindle and I read books on the physical kindle in bed, often it's easier to take notes from a book and to flick through a book when I'm on my iPad, and so I've got a library with lots and lots of books on kindle, and usually I'm reading them on kindle highlighting them when I'm in bed. But if I want to take notes on them properly, I'll use the app and yeah it's. It's pretty good and the really cool thing about the Kindle app is that it works really nicely with split screen, and so, if I'm reading through a book to take notes on it or to do a book review of it, that I post on my website an email newsletter, I can just sort of flick through the book nicely on the Kindle app on the iPad. And then I can be writing in my notes, usually on notion using my book notes template the other cool feature of the Kindle app is that you can see your highlights on kindle very easily. So it's got the notebook feature, and so, with this book making of a manager, I've got loads and loads of highlights and I can flick through them nicely and easily on kindle, and then I can use those highlights to build my own book notes around in notion, and that brings us to my number one productivity app for the iPad, which, unsurprisingly, is notion itself.

No, they are not sponsoring this video. Unfortunately, in fact no one is sponsoring this video. So I hope you guys enjoy the ad free experience, but I use notion for almost everything in my life, especially all the stuff that relates to creation and website and YouTube content and ideas and courses and helping my team helping out with things it's just the ultimate app for everything. So what have you got? Video ideas, my book read-wise, the part-time YouTuber academy, my life operating system sponsored videos, video scheduled team, home projects, task lists, sops, individual pages channel hub courses, not overthinking, my podcast books and yeah, there are just zillions of things to go over with notion, but this video has gone on long enough. If you haven't seen how I use notion for various things, I've put together a short playlist for you over here, which has all of my notion-specific videos about how I use notion to supercharge my productivity.

Thank you. So much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video bye.

Source : Ali Abdaal