The January focus – New Media Review 6

In the New Media Review, we break down 3 tools that could help you personally and/or professionally.

For many, January is a month of organisation, planning and concentrating on the year ahead. This month’s New Media Review will be showcasing three tools to help with your ‘January focus’.

Any.do

No matter what your January has in store, chances are you have a to-do list. If you need help taking control of your tasks, Any.do may be the service for you.

Any.do is a to-do list manager, which allows you to access and sync your tasks across multiple devices.

Users can add tasks by typing or via speech recognition and organise them into themes (for example: work, personal errands). You can add notes to your tasks, subtasks and mostly importantly set dates and reminders. The interface is uncluttered and easy to use on a phone screen.

A free version of Any.do is available for iOS, Android and Web. The Premium version has features such as unlimited sharing and collaboration, themes and extra file storage, but is not necessary to have in order to make use of the great organisational features Any.do has to offer.

Forest

Need a bit of time away from your devices to concentrate? Measure your focus with tiny trees.

Whenever you need to focus on your work, open Forest and set the amount of time you need to away from your phone or internet browser. Forest will plant a tree which will grow whilst you are working – but don’t leave the app to check you phone, or your tree will die! Forest will even prompt you to put your phone down if you try to check on the progress of your tree. The more time you spend focusing, the more types of tree you can plant.

Every time you create a tree it will be added to your forest that represents the time you’ve spent focusing. You can even tag different trees with categories such as work, study and social and see how much time you have spent on each.

Forest is available for free on iOS, Android, Chrome and Firefox.

Noisli

Having trouble creating a productive atmosphere (or a relaxing one)? Try Noisli!

Noisli allows you to mix sounds to help block unwanted background noise and create the perfect ambience for your task. Available sounds to mix range from rain (with added thunder if you like!) through to coffee shop noise and chatter.

If you create an account, your favourite combinations of sounds can be saved for future use. You can even share your creations with friends via social media and email.  The web version of Noisli also contains a free plain text editor for a distraction free writing experience.

Noisli is freely available for web, iOS and Android, as well as a Chrome extension.