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These apps will help you crank up office productivity from your smartphone:

1. Project Schedule Free

This app will help you schedule and prioritize your projects and tasks from your smartphone. You can see long or short-term deadlines and projections at a glance on a Gantt chart, as well as group tasks by priority or project. You can compose a Gantt chart on your smartphone and easily export it to .png format for use in a PowerPoint or Prezi on the same day. If you start the day with a commute on the metro, this will help you hit the ground running once you arrive at the office.

2. Dropbox

This is the simplest, most effective networking software on the market—once you’ve shared folders with your employees, simply drag and drop files from any computer into a shared folder accessible by any client or employee with an internet connection. The Dropbox app connects your Android phone to your office’s shared folders, which is immensely useful when facing deadlines or oversights. If you’re up against a deadline and forgot a necessary document at home, you can access it through your Dropbox folder. This app is equally useful for keeping your project teams on the same page; by providing a shared file structure for your projects, you can make sure that everyone is aware of everyone else’s work, minimizing duplication and wasted effort.

3. Skype Mobile for Android

This app can drastically shrink the cost of your inter-office communications. Emails take time, and internal phone calls add up; but if your teams have Skype Mobile, they can send and receive phone calls Skype-to-Skype wherever they have wireless coverage for free. If your office has T-Mobile wireless coverage, you’ll be able to call each other for free almost anywhere in the country. Personal contact builds team cohesion and motivates solid work; the option of video conferencing from your smartphone makes it easier to build real relationships with your team, even when you can’t be there in person.

4. WinScribe Digital Dictation For Android

The difficulty of typing on a smartphone is a fact of life for the foreseeable future, so good voice-recognition software is the only way to efficiently produce large quantities of text on your smartphone. While dictation technology in the past has used clunky equipment, this app lets you securely dictate, transcribe, and review finished documents from your smartphone—making working from your smartphone as effective as working from the office in almost every way.

5. Nozbe

This app connects your iPhone to the comprehensive Getting Things Done (GTD) system, prioritizing and categorizing you and your team’s daily tasks so that every task has the appropriate time allocated, and every hour of the workday has a task allocated. By establishing a single Nozbe account for your team, you can keep everyone running on a unified schedule, coordinating tasks so that your team works together smoothly and efficiently. From your iPhone, you can plan tasks, invite feedback, and keep track of what operations have been delegated to which teams or employees.

6. Outpost 2

This app will allow you to access your BaseCamp management software from your iPhone or iPad. With multi-account support, you can manage more than one BaseCamp account from a single device. You can add or edit milestones, new tasks, and send or receive messages from your team. The app features partial offline support as well, so even when you’re out of your coverage area, you can still access most functions. Unfortunately, serious design flaws have been reported which make this app useful only for short-term goal setting (within 48 hours), but if you use BaseCamp software, this is an excellent choice to make your down-time more productive.

Bio: Jane Johnson is a writer for GoingCellular, a popular site that provides cell phone related news, commentary, reviews on popular providers like T-Mobile.

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