As a digital nomad, your life depends naturally on technology. You need it to earn your income, organize your lifestyle and it helps you to stay in touch with your family and friends. Luckily, there are tons of tools, websites, and apps out there, that make a remote job as easy as never before. Check out the following list with some of the best and most popular digital nomad apps out there to help you with your location-independent lifestyle.
Table of Contents
1. Organization
Trello
Trello is one of the most popular digital nomad apps because it helps you keep track of all of your business projects. You can exchange notes with your clients or coworkers, leave comments, upload files, set deadlines, and create boards for different plans. A great project management software that you can have for free.
Active Collab
Active Collab is another great project management tool, which is designed specifically for team collaborations. It allows you to track times, budget your project finances, process invoices, and to manage your resources.
Evernote
Evernote is a fantastic tool to organize all of the little things you want or need to keep. It doesn’t matter if you have websites, files, or photos. This digital notepad stores everything nice and neatly.
Wunderlist
Another one of the very popular digital nomad apps that most of us have used before. Wunderlist is a very powerful to-do list, which helps you structure your private and business tasks. You can share the lists and assign projects to others.
2. Productivity
Twilight
A big advantage of being self-employed and able to work from anywhere in the world is that you get to choose your own schedule. But sitting in front of your laptop until late at night isn’t exactly good for your sleeping rhythm. Neither are constantly changing time zones.
Twilight adjusts the color of your display to the time of the day. It’s warmer at night and lighter during the day. This helps your brain to adjust, so you get more sleep.
Focus@will
As a remote worker, you usually don’t have a quiet office to work from, but often work from places such as busy cafés, airports, or train stations. With all the noise it’s hard to focus on your work. Focus@will has a great selection of white noise and simple tunes that help you to cover the background noise and thus, concentrate better.
Time Doctor
Time Doctor tracks your daily tasks and prepares and sends bills to your clients automatically. But even if you are not working as a freelancer, this is an incredibly powerful time management app. Every time you are about to get distracted by things like Facebook or YouTube, the app reminds you to stay focused on your work. This will increase your productivity big time, trust me!
It also integrates with all leading project management tools and lets you create helpful reports on your performance.
3. Money
XE Currency
One of those digital nomad apps you can’t live without. XE Currency is an easy-to-handle currency converter, that gives you the exact exchange rate for several currencies at the same time. The best thing: is it’s free!
Trail Wallet
When you are traveling it’s easy to lose track of your daily expenses. But they quickly add up and your tight travel budget might not be too happy about that. Trail Wallet helps you to track your expenses (even in different currencies). You can set daily budgets and can thus analyze and improve your money situation.
Xero
Xero is a powerful solution to handle your business expenses. The app helps you with your bookkeeping and accounting, like sending invoices, tracking your cash flow, setting payment notifications, or categorizing bank transactions to keep you organized.
4. Health
Seven
As a digital nomad, you often don’t have a gym available. But you still want to stay fit, right? Use the fitness app Seven, which gives you intense 7-minute workouts on a daily basis. You get the maximum benefit out of a short amount of time and don’t even need any equipment.
Farmstand
Farmstand is an interactive map that shows you where to get fresh produce and where you can find the best local markets. It has open times, directions, and photos from places all over the world. Eat healthy and fresh wherever you go!
Headspace
Meditation is a great way to reduce stress and keep your mind focused. No surprise that many location-independent nomads love to meditate regularly to stay productive and in balance. Headspace teaches you how to meditate for only a few minutes every day.
5. Travel
Tripit
Traveling a lot also means you have many different booking confirmations and documents somewhere in your emails or on your laptop. Tripit is a free travel planner that organizes all of those digital documents so you know exactly where to click when you need your hotel address or the right airport terminal. The app even works without an internet connection.
Workfrom
Every digital nomad needs an app like Workfrom. It shows you the best cafés, pubs, and restaurants for great wi-fi connections around the world. In addition to that, you get information about the atmosphere, meal options, prices, noise range, and additional tips, like what table to choose.
iTranslate
Traveling to different countries also means you have to deal with different languages. ITranslate is a great app that helps you to read, write and speak in 90 languages. You don’t even need to worry about pronunciation because the app reads the translation out for you. In addition to that, you also can share everything via text messages or email if needed.
Google Translate
Another good translation option would be Google Translate. Although it is not exactly famous for its perfect grammar, the app has some very handy features. Once downloaded, you can use the dictionary offline, which is great. You can also use the camera on your phone to scan in texts, so you don’t even need to type it in anymore.
Hopper
Everyone who books a lot of flights will love Hopper. You pick your destination and a calendar will show you the best time to book your ticket. The analytics are based on factors like search volume and display when prices are anticipated to fall or rise. A brilliant way to easily save some money.
DayOne
DayOne is a great tool to write a travel journal. The app adds date, time, and weather to your personal notes. In case you don’t know what to write about, it gives you inspirational quotes and questions to trigger the author in you.
The usual struggle: You’re strolling through your newsfeed, and find a super interesting article but have no time to read it. The solution: Pocket saves everything you can find on the internet and removes the annoying ads, so you can read it later offline.
Every Time Zone
Being a digital nomad also means that you are often in different time zones than your clients or family and friends. That makes it very complicated to find the right time to call or to stick to deadlines. With Every Time Zone you’ve got that problem solved. With this app, you’ll never lose sight of the right time again.
Psst…for more apps that will help you work remotely, check out the linked list!
Handy Digital Nomad Apps for Everyone
Most of these digital nomad apps are free or cost only a few dollars. It doesn’t matter if you are a freelancer, entrepreneur, work-from-home-mom, or remote employee. Check out these great tools to make your location-independent lifestyle much easier.
I’m constantly on the look for new apps. Do you know of any other cool and useful ones? Let me know in the comment section below!
If you need more help with organizing your new life, have a look at these communities for digital nomads and meet many like-minded people.
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Thanks a lot, Nathan! Totally agree, Headspace and Trello are some absolute classics. And thanks for your suggestion. I will definitely check out Nomad Budget soon, sounds helpful indeed! :)
Hey Denise this list is super helpful! I have been using Headspace and Trello every day and couldn’t imagine my life without them.
For our finances we have tried out a lot of different options and finally settled on an app that isn’t in this list. It’s called Nomad Budget and it’s available for iPhone. There are a lot of different features that aren’t found in other budget apps and it really just clicked for our needs. We have been really on top of our finances because it helps us to pay close attention to what we are spending.
Thanks again for the great list, I’m going to check out some of your suggestions.
Thanks a lot, Tiago! Your app definitely sounds interesting, I will check it out later! :)
Thanks for the great list! I’ve started traveling 3 months ago without a return ticket and these apps are so useful (didn’t know about Hopper and will definitely check there before booking the next flight).
Since I started traveling I’ve realised that many wi-fi networks specially in airports are time limited which means I couldn’t work for too long. Therefore I built a simple free Mac app to overcome this called Airpass (http://airpass.tiagoalves.me/).
It would be great to get your feedback on it and who knows add it to the list :)
Thank you once again!
Excellent article!
Have you seen tried VidaLingua language apps? Very useful for digital nomads.
http://vidalingua.com