Macs are really amazing machines. They are capable of performing like a beast while looking extremely well designed. That’s just how Apple works: be productive, look good. We think it’s important that Mac users become more and more productive with these devices. After all, higher productivity leads to better gains and more time to pursue the leisure activities of your choosing. To that end, we have compiled a list of 15 productivity apps for Mac that we love using for focusing on work, and think that you will, too.

If there’s one feature that has been conspicuously missing from Apple’s feature set as compared to Windows’, it’s the capability to snap windows to corners and edges, arrange multiple windows alongside each other, or stack them on top of one another. Apple did introduce this feature (or a subset of this feature) in OS X Yosemite, but it only works when the apps are in full screen mode. Not very nifty, and not at all what we have come to expect from the tech giant everyone associates with attention to detail.

No matter who you are, or what you do, there is absolutely no way you don’t type things out on your Mac. Whether you’re writing the next bestselling novel or simply taking notes in a lecture, a good text editor never goes amiss. Combine that with minimal design that stays out of your way, markup editing, and live preview, and you’ll end up with Ulysses.

Oh, and did I mention? The exports look great no matter what format you export to. All your formatting is rendered perfectly. That really is the interface of Ulysses. It’s THAT clean.

Obviously, not everyone knows, or is comfortable with, markup. Ulysses easily sorts that out. All you need to do is press Command + 9 and a drop down with all the formatting keywords appear.

No, this app will not pour out your drinks for you. It will, however, let you re-arrange or even hide the menu bar items on your Mac.

System menu bar items could always be repositioned in OS X by pressing down Command and then clicking and dragging the items around. However, Bartender takes it one step further and allows you to reposition third party apps’ menu items as well. Not only that, Bartender can let you completely hide the items from the menu bar if you want.

Don’t you wish that your Mac could automatically lock itself when you walked away from the screen and unlock itself when you came back? It’s the kind of seamless functionality that seems minor, but can improve productivity by a lot. This is exactly the problem that Near Lock solves.

Near Lock has both a free option and a paid option. I went with the free one for trying it out, and it works pretty well. However, the free app does not work in background. This means that the app needs to remain open on the screen of your iPhone for it to work.

I spend a lot of time poring over my laptop screen late at night, and I’m sure it’s not just me.

It comes with a pretty decent configuration by default, but it can be modified endlessly to suit your personal need.

Short Menu is an app that automatically creates shortened version of URLs, right in your menu bar. It allows you to shorten links with well known prefixes, such as bit.ly, goo.gl and the likes. If you share a lot of URLs with people, this app will come in handy for you.

Download here (Free trial, $2.99)

How often have you whined about having to go to launchpad, swiping through the screens and selecting the app you wanted to run? Even with Spotlight, you need to press Command + Space and then type at least a part of the application’s name to launch it.

Download here (Free)

If you have used the Calendar app on Mac, you’ll probably agree that it’s a decent application. Fantastical is basically a super powered Calendar application that allows you to create events using natural language queries.

Let’s be honest, every one of us has forgotten passwords at one point in time or another. If you’re like me, you probably forget yours once every month. That’s what the “forgot password” option is for, after all. We can’t remember every password we create, and we can’t remember the details to our credit and debit cards.

Download here (Free trial, Paid plans start from $5)

Alfred is a highly improved version of Spotlight with a lot of extra features. Once you start using it, it’ll soon replace Spotlight as your go to app for looking up files on your mac, searching the web or even looking up definitions. Alfred has both a free and a paid version with varying feature sets.

11. OmniFocus

Simply put, OmniFocus is a supercharged task management and to-do list app. It goes well beyond what any to-do list app does and it does it in a very great way. OmniFocus allows you to divide tasks into groups, assign priorities and deadlines to tasks. It allows you to sort the tasks by context, by flags or simply by the groups assigned to them.

It’s not an uncommon occurrence where we are browsing through the internet and come across some link that looks interesting but is not something we want to immediately see or read. This is exactly the use case for Pocket.

No matter what you do, keeping track of time is important. Be it day to day tasks like the time you spend reading your favourite book, eating food or whether it’s the time you dedicate to each of your professional projects at work, time tracking is essential to increasing productivity and helping you achieve your goals. Everyday.

Toggl has four different plans available. The good news is that there is a free plan for teams of up to 5 people.

If you are anything like me, you probably have felt the desire to watch a YouTube video, or read an article while you work on some stuff. You could be a developer who needs to read documentation while they code, or maybe you are referring to an article for work. It’s boring and rather time consuming to constantly switch between applications or tabs, and it’s not even a viable option if you want to watch videos while working.

Helium is a floating browser that you can place anywhere on your screen. You can set it up to be translucent, with varying amounts of opacity so that it doesn’t get in your way while you work. While Helium is translucent, it doesn’t respond to clicks, so you can freely use your mouse to work on the entire screen. Just “Command+Tab” into Helium if you need to close it or load up a different URL.

I download a lot of stuff on my Mac and chances are you do, too. A lot of things I download are zips and other extractable files, and it tends to clutter up my “Downloads” folder a bit (or a lot, to be honest).

While we can take time out regularly to perform some housekeeping tasks on our Macs, why not automate it? After all, just like Murphy’s Law states that “What can happen, will happen”, the tech-savvy people at Beebom say “What can be automated, will be automated.” It’s a good phrase, and is definitely a productivity booster.

SEE ALSO: How to Prevent Eye Strain from Working With Gadgets at Night

These 15 apps are, in our opinion, the best apps to boost your productivity on the Mac.