When I sit down to work on a blog post, one of the first things I do is log off of Facebook and email. This is because every time I stop to check a notification, I will undoubtedly fall into the procrastination wormhole that leads me meandering across the Internet and reading things that have nothing to do with my original blog post. According to this Wall Street Journal article, “It takes more than 25 minutes, on average, to resume a task after being interrupted.” Even worse, “It takes an additional 15 minutes to regain the same intense focus or ‘flow’ as before the interruption.” That’s forty entire minutes. And that doesn’t even take into consideration multiple interruptions.
Of course, interruptions are an unavoidable part of daily life. But we can limit them! And we can also find ways to make ourselves more organized and more productive so we will have a little more time left over once we finally find our way out of that wormhole. Today, I’ve put together a list of five of my favorite apps that help me work smarter and faster. All of these are absolutely free and some you can download right onto your computer.
We recently reached over 100,000 views on our 
