Productivity and mindfulness can sometimes feel like odd bedfellows. But, with the world being forced to slow down, we’re finding out that the old way of crunching hours at a desk doesn’t necessarily increase your productivity. In fact, slowing down has produced the quality work that we thought grinding would do.

Speaking to mindfulness teacher Anna Zannides, slowing down achieves this in several ways. “It helps you sort through all the noise in your mind,” she says. “If you’re busy, if you’re focusing on too much at one point in time, you can’t focus as clearly as you would if you managed to slow down and to remove unnecessary thinking.”

The positive aspects of mindfulness can also help you when you’re stuck in a rut. Zannides focuses on compassion-based mindfulness, which includes “being a lot kinder to yourself. We aren’t just productive beings. We’re not here just to produce.” Coming to terms with this fact alone can help you realize that there are limitations to production. 

There’s also realizing how you deal with distractions and how that affects productivity. “Some people could be working from morning until night and have produced very little and others can work for a few hours and produce a lot. So I think that’s all to do with how distracted you are.”

And these distractions led to a lack of productivity, which then led to feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed. “[People are] not quite sure if they can meet the expectation of what they are supposed to be doing. It all causes an unhealthy relationship with themselves and their work.”

So, to combat this, we’ve compiled five of the best mindfulness apps that’ll help you increase your productivity in a helpful way.