From a very young age, I have been exposed to computers, at home and even at School. This has made me realize their importance and relevance in our world. Well, some do not see the need to own one but for me, it’s more than a need to get by our everyday life – computers coupled with smartphones and all connected to an internet network.

If you use computers on a daily basis there are apps that you have subscribed to so as to make your workflow seamless. Here are the 4 Apps that I have grown fond of. If I m doing work-related tasks I cannot navigate my way around those tasks whilst avoiding these for apps.

📝Notion

Notion is at the top of this list because it is like a factory in which everything I do is created\manufactured. Introduced to me in 2019 whilst I was in my final year at university as a note-taking app, ever since I have really liked to use it as a replacement for my many notebooks. It gave me the ability to organize my books in one app creating pages for almost anything.

Though it takes time to fully transition from physical to digital, Notion has proved to be an easy app to incorporate in my life compared to the mighty Office Word. My work revolves around researching, writing proposals therefore a powerful note-taking app became my comrade in battle. Thanks to Youtubers such as Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank I now have a digital space to organize my work in.

One thing that makes me like Notion more is that it has a mobile app as well so say I m working on research on my computer and I have to be at a meeting across town I know I have a desktop in my pocket if any idea pops up I simply grab my phone and jot it down. I can even continue working if I m delayed or something.

💾Google Drive

Google Drive is a no-brainer. I have had a Google account since 2009. I never really used the Google Drive facility since I could not afford data back then and besides, I really had nothing to save on cloud storage. My physical storage just worked fine. For those of you who don’t know, as long as you have a Google account you have free 15gig cloud storage at your disposal. You can use it for anything you would like to backup.

I started using Google drive as a way to back up my notes at University. We used to get PowerPoint presentations and word document notes for our various courses hence the need of backing them up motivated me to use the service. Now there is a very powerful feature called google drive for desktop. This feature allows you to access your cloud documents as if they are stored on the computer however whatever you do in that folder is automatically synced to the cloud.

With the availability of the internet at school and nowadays at work I can now afford to work 100% in my Google Drive folder not worrying about losing files anymore. all I have to make sure is that my computers are password protected so as to restrict unauthorized use. One thing I like about Google Drive for desktop is that it helped me replicate what connected computers do. Basically, I logged in to Google Drive at my work machine, installed Google Drive for desktop, and do the same with my home machine, now whatever I m working on at work is automatically synced to the cloud and I can access the same cloud storage at my home machine meaning I can stop working at a file and continue at home as if I m on a work intranet, how cool is that?

Another good thing about google drive is that you can easily access it via mobile so literally, I have my office in my pocket. Notion and Google Drive.

🔎Microsoft Edge

I have been a fan of Google Chrome over the years, there is no better browser that got the job done the way chrome did it. However, Microsoft built Microsoft Edge based on the same open software chrome is built on, creating a chrome-like browser. Everything I did on Google Chrome I can now do on Microsoft Edge especially installing chrome extensions. I use a lot of extensions to make my life easy – the Grammarly extension is the one I use the most to check for spellings and typos in Notion, when writing emails, and even Blog Posts and Newsletters. So I am not losing out. Google Chrome is good, but personally these days I prefer Microsoft Edge due to the user interface, maybe it’s because I needed a break from the king of browsers.

To add on research has it that Microsoft Edge is lighter than Google Chrome meaning it saves resources on a computer and I even like the way tabs sleep when they are not in use for some time something you don’t see in Google Chrome. There is now not much of a difference between the two browsers it zeros down to which one do you personally prefer.

📂Microsoft office

Microsoft has done it, they have created a standard in which no matter what trade you do, in most cases you will have to use one of their apps in the Microsoft Office Suite. for me since I do a lot of research the standard file format we share our documents in is Microsoft Word doc. Of the apps that are in the suite, I use Word the most then followed by Excel. Word is a powerful app that has been around for a long time because of that it has many features to make the document presentable. Again as mentioned before it’s like the standard for most people, imagine sharing a Notion page with someone, chances are you will just confuse them if not frustrate them. So my workflow usually looks something like this, I do research on Microsoft Edge write in Notion, and then when done copy-paste to Microsoft Word when it’s ready for sharing then save the Word files in Google Drive.

Conclusion

Most of the Apps mentioned above rely on an internet connection to work properly though I can work offline in Notion and Google Drive for Desktop the experience is more fun when there is an internet connection. These are the 4 main desktop Apps I use for my work.