Picture this…you’ve just downloaded a brand-new productivity app for your office projects.

You then remember you have an app that tracks household and personal chores, tasks and errands.

Should you transfer all of your existing info into the new app, or should you keep things separated?

In this post I’m going to cover a few times when it might be a good idea to use different apps for your needs.

You benefit from having information physically separated.

As the adage goes, “Out of sight, out of mind.” If you’re the type of person who does better with having their work, school and home tasks separated from one another, you might consider a separate app for each section of your life.

Sure, in some apps you can completely disable or focus on particular projects, but if you are reminded of your work assignments each time you open the app on your downtime of evenings or weekends, it might be time to divide and conquer.

You might stick with a more complex and project based app for your work assignments, while a simple checklist or task list app might suit you just fine for your household and personal items.

Your app shares information with another app.

There are some apps out there which allow you to share information or data with other apps. Talk about strength in numbers! Not only can you enter and access data from app A, but you can also do the same with app B and gain valuable insight through custom reports you may not be able to generate using app A alone.

For example, app A might be a step tracking app on your smart phone and app B might be a food diary or calorie counting app. In this case it would make sense to share data so you can have different ways of interpreting how many steps you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned and so on. Of course this won’t always work for all apps and all data entered, but it is something to keep in mind.

You want to test the effectiveness of an app.

Sometimes the only way to see if an app will work well for you is to just get in and start using it! I don’t recommend switching all of your data to a brand-new app from the get-go; choose one small, non-sensitive project as a test run. Experiment with the new app for a couple of days as you use your old app.

What does the new app do better than the old one? What are its limitations? As you go through your trial period, you might find one app is better suited to a particular area of your life than another.

How about you? Do you stick to just to one app for your needs or do you use several similar ones at a time? Join in the conversation and leave a comment below!