South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Free apps that make remote work way better
Fun fact about me: I love working from home. It is, quite simply, the best. You might also love it, hate it or fall somewhere in the middle. Whatever the case, if you find yourself working from home on a regular basis, you must add these four free apps to your remote-work setup.
Block background noise with Krisp
You’re on a Zoom call with your boss. The dog is barking. The baby is crying. Your anxiety level is nearing a fever pitch. In the words of every late-night infomercial ever produced: There’s got tobea better way!
Enter Krisp, a truly wonderful miracle of modern technology. It’s an app that essentially acts as a bridge between your microphone and your communications apps — it works with more than 800 of them — and uses artificial intelligence to isolate your voice while blocking out pets, people, keyboard clacks and more.
While some apps, like Zoom, have built-in background noise suppression, often the higher you crank it up, the more muddled your actual voice sounds. Not so with Krisp, which somehow manages to block everything out while keeping you sounding like you.
Stay on task with Forest
Sometimes it’s challenging to stay focused while working from home — and the combination of having your phone within arm’s reach at all times and no prying eyes to catch you slacking off can make for a precarious productivity predicament. And while there’s no shortage of forced-focus apps out there, Forest offers a unique spin on the category.
Fire up the free app and tap the “Plant Tree” button to start growing a little virtual tree. As long as you stay off your phone for the duration of the in-app timer — the default is 25 minutes — the tree will grow. If you exit the app to mess around on your phone, the tree dies.
Get several focus sessions per day under your belt, and you’ll have yourself an adorable little forest full of productivity trees.
Better yet, unlock the pro version of the app for $2 (one-time purchase), and as you amass virtual trees, you earn in-app coins that you can use to plant real-life trees via the app’s partnership with the Trees for the Future organization.
Take periodic breaks with Stretchly
When working from home, it’s tempting to plop yourself down in your chair and power through the workday until there’s no work left to be done. Stretchly forces you to take 20-second breaks every 15 minutes and 3-minute breaks every hour — by surfacing a big, unmovable window over the top of everything you’re working on.
The short breaks will entail things like refocusing your eyes on something far away, doing neck swirls or repositioning the back support on your chair. The longer breaks will direct you to tidy up your workspace, step away from your desk for a bit or even squeezein a quick mini-workout.
Dial up audio ambience with myNoise
MyNoise has more than 200 sound generators to choose from, and they’re categorized by need, such as “I need to focus,” “I need to calm down,” “It’s too quiet,” “I need inspiration so I can write” and a whole bunch of other helpful options. You can play everything right from within your browser, and there are both iPhone and Android versions available. Each generated sound features 10 tweakable audio sliders that you can finesse in order to create the perfect mix.