Research shows that 67 per cent of employees wish they were offered flexible working; that 53 per cent believe they’d be more productive if they worked away from the office; and that 40 per cent would choose flexible working over a pay rise if they could only choose one.
The trick, in a world where the traditional 9-to-5 model of working is crumbling, is to make your phone behave as much like your office as possible. Turns out, there are plenty of apps for that!
Work on the bus, work by the pool, work in your bed (if you must) with these three handy apps.
They are all connected to that most ubiquitous part of working life: the PDF (which stands for portable document format, in case you’ve ever wondered). If the last thing chaining you to your desk is your constant and crucial use of PDFs, we are here to change your life.
The PDF Splitter app may not be the coolest addition to your iPhone screen but what it lacks in glamour it makes up in functionality. Use this slick stand-alone app to split large PDF documents into small ones quickly and flexibly.
The PDF Editor app does the opposite, allowing you (among a host of other functions) to rejoin specific pages, change the order of pages, annotate the document and generally tinker around.
Meanwhile – and we are pretty certain that this one is going to blow your mind – the Genius Scan app is a scanner in your pocket. Yes, you heard correctly. This app turns your smartphone into a scanner. It uses clever algorithms to detect a piece of paper, apply perspective correction, enhance the colours and scan it into a digitised document. In a couple of taps, your paper document has become a sharp, clean PDF file that you can share to your heart’s content.
A truly global app, Genius Scan is available in 20 languages. The story of its creation is a good one. Its techy, young founders say:
“In 2010, Eyjafjallajokull filled the European sky with ashes and grounded us in Chicago. Our flight was cancelled; we used the money from the ticket to purchase a Macbook and created Genius Scan. Since then, [over] 20 million users have downloaded Genius Scan worldwide and scanned more than 200 million documents. Users love it, consistently rate it five stars and Apple features it regularly.”
The team behind Genius Scan is on a mission to rid individuals and small businesses of unnecessary paper and to manage their documents digitally. Sounds like a good mission to us! They are constantly working on new ways to further this cause – check out their blog for updates.
We reckon you should download these apps this instant – then lie back on your sun lounger and relax. So long, water-cooler chat! Farewell, office politics! For those businesses whose structure and function allows it, flexible working is looking prettier than ever.
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Turn your smartphone into a professional camera
Putting content at the heart of your business
Offtime
August 2019
By Becky Ladenburg