Building and maintaining a website takes a lot of effort, creativity, and time to ensure it’s attractive, flawless, and effective. With web design being a highly competitive field, you must always strive to improve your productivity to stay on top of the game.
But with so many obstacles along the way, including distractions, temptations for procrastination, or just a lack of motivation, things can feel overwhelming. Luckily, investing in the right productivity tools for web designers empowers you to make a huge impact on your hourly output and the quality of your work.
These tools allow you to improve your skills, make projects less sophisticated, and ultimately, make you more efficient.
Ready to find out more about these tools? Let’s get started!
8 Productivity Tools to Boost Your Efficiency as a Web Designer
Boost Your Focus with Momentum
You won’t get a lot of work done if you can’t focus due to background noise. A third of workers lose up to three hours a day due to distractions like social media and chatty colleagues. That adds up to 60 hours every month and 759 hours each year.
Since most of these distractions come from the internet, Momentum ensures you stay on track. It’s a simple browser plugin that will enhance your day and help you remain focused on what really matters.
Apart from the stunning scenery and inspiring messages, Momentum lets you schedule tasks and create to-do lists. You can also set up targets and reminders, so you can stay on track with the main goal of the day.
Cost: Free, paid version available
Monitor Your Activities with Traqq
You can’t block distractions if you don’t know their sources. Traqq captures all your work activities, recording every minute of your workday. It then lets you pull a report of your time usage every week or month and visualize your time or your team’s.
Another great feature of Traqq is that it allows you to scale up by adding team members into the system. You can then break the teams into groups, depending on projects or other criteria and assign each group a team leader.
Traqq is also an employee monitoring software that captures your or your team’s websites and apps usage to see where your time really goes. If you discover you or someone on the team spends too much time on Facebook, you can take steps to correct this.
It runs in the background, analyzing your or your team’s performance levels, and then provides a productivity score based on your activities. The app can really be helpful when you want to track project progress without micromanaging your team.
Cost: Free with unlimited features, paid version available
Collaborate with Slack
Slack offers a single workspace to help teams communicate effectively and stay organized. The tool utilizes multiple bots and app integrations to ensure streamlined workflows between clients and teams.
Slack is packed with some neat features for web designers, like the ability to share code snippets directly within the app. Clients can also share comments about projects and request changes or report bugs.
It’s the most effective tool to eliminate internal emails. This means, you can recover up to 28 percent of your workweek, which is lost managing emails, according to a McKinsey report.
Cost: Free, paid version available
Coordinate with Trello
In web design and maintenance, team coordination is everything. Trello is a collaboration tool that allows teams to add attachments, comment, and organize their projects and priorities.
You can group projects into boards and create tasks using cards. You can assign each card with its own date, notes, checklists, attachments, and so on. Users can simply drag each card into its appropriate column and update it each step of the way.
Cost: Free, paid version available
Block Distractions with Freedom
Like Momentum, the Freedom app helps you stay focused on the task at hand. But rather than displaying inspirational quotes, it blocks websites and apps that you know tempt you to stray from doing real work.
It can even control internet access on your phone or computer. The tool lets you block distracting sites for specified periods of time to minimize procrastination so you can get more work done.
If you struggle with phone addiction, KeepMeOut is a great alternative. It locks you out of your device for a period specified by you. So, if you always itch to scroll through Instagram or Facebook during work hours, you can block access to those apps for a set period of time.
Or, you can limit how long you use specific apps or websites. For example, you can limit Facebook to 30 minutes per day and get your productivity back on track.
Cost: Free trial
Take Notes with Evernote
Physical notebooks are still very much in use today. However, if you want to stay in the loop and easily sync all your notes digitally, Evernote is the app to go for.
As a web designer, you want somewhere to keep your ideas flowing or jot a quick note that comes to mind when having a cup of coffee. You also want somewhere you can organize your thoughts and useful pieces of information about your clients and projects.
Evernote works on all your devices, including your mobile, so you can access it whenever you want. What’s more, it allows you to take notes of any kind – from text and images to sound files – and organize them in collections.
The best part is that all the information saved on Evernote is searchable.
Cost: Free, paid version available
Visualize with Unsplash
Visuals are a major part of the web design world. Every new website you create will need a new set of pictures, and finding unique images can be a time-consuming exercise. Plus, to make a website stand out, you wouldn’t want to use generic stock photos.
That’s where Unsplash comes in. The platform offers high-quality images, and all their images come with a CC0 license. The app allows you to quickly search for the right image from their massive library, which has over a dozen different categories.
Streamline Mockups with Figma
Clients like to see mockups of what the end product will look like so they know what to expect. Figma is a flexible web design platform that helps you create and demonstrate web designs over the web.
It enables effortless collaboration between teams and supports real-time feedback from clients. You don’t need third-party tools to facilitate the exchange of mockups and updates when you have Figma. The in-app commenting feature allows users to review designs and share files with ease.
In a Nutshell
Productivity tools for web designers help you work more efficiently. They help streamline your workflow process, making it less stressful. These tools also help you monitor your daily activities, so you can take control of time and prevent burnout from happening.
