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Five Productivity Apps to Kick-Start the New Year

toobravetosave said:
this has confused me for the longest time and basically stops me from using reminders....

managing these productivity apps has become intensive and annoying
Click to expand...
Try Agenda. On the Mac right sidebar there is a timeline which is a combination of Apple reminders and calendar entries. One of the nice things about Agenda, which is a date based notes app, is you can set a reminder for a specific paragraph in a note.
Organization in Agenda is by category - project - note. Notes can have dates attached to them or not; my daily journal notes have dates attached to them. Any note that has a deadline should have a date attached to it, but reference notes don’t need a date attached to them and they work just fine.
EDIT: In the app is an icon to take you to the Agenda Community; a Discourse-based forum. I'd make an account using an email address that isn't your AppleID. That works better, because that Agenda account (used for Premium features -> 1 year of a subscription gives you 12 months of additional Premium Features, yours to keep forever) also serves as your Community forum login.
 
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Populus said:
Just curious, do you heavily use the “scheduled” list? Or do you evenly distribute tasks over all your lists? Do you place the activity on the Calendar app right after scheduling the reminder? It would be nice some kind of integration between Remainders and Calendar apps…

I have to admit that I’m using Remainders and Calendar iOS apps more and more for the last couple of years, but I still use the Tasks app, for more specific and detailed workflows.
Click to expand...

I use the Getting things done method by David Allen. Getting things out of your head the minute you think about them is critical, even if you’re not assigning dates to them. An Inbox is important, as is trusting yourself to reviewing it, at least once a week. Things was the first productivity app to be inspired by GTD and offer the appropriate tools. I was surprised to find that Reminders now had the capabilities to do everything I needed it to, with a couple of improvements over Things:

  1. Siri, no fuss, no porting things over. Because it’s important to get things out of my head, I just call them out if I’m at home with HomePods in every room, or hold the Digital Crown on my Watch if I’m somewhere else. It lands in an InboX in Reminders.
  2. Draggable tasks to calendar. At least, once a week, I’ll drag tasks from my Inbox to my Calendar. Things gained this ability on Mac recently, but Reminders does it on iPad too, which is how I organize my days: leaning back on a couch on my iPad, with reminders and Calendar side-by-side.
Yes, I make good use of scheduled reminders, but primarily for repetitive tasks. Pay the rent and bills, do my finances, weekend home reset (dozens of tasks on this weekly project), water plants, and importantly, a reminder to review my inbox.

I’d go deeper but this post is getting long. I’ll end by saying that Things has a beautiful UI and fun animations, a real surprise and delight feel to it. Reminders has a nice UI but in a different way. It’s been getting lots of attention from Apple and I look forward to even more improvements. It was not easy “cheating on” my 15 year relationship with Things, but Reminders looks like it’ll stick.
 
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jujoje said:
I think this is certainly the case for some of them; the other is that productivity videos gets the clicks. Totally agree about to simplicity. Some apps like seem to be more for people who like tweaking their productivity systems than anything else. I'm sure people find them useful, but they're way beyond my relatively simple needs (I'd argue that Things and Bear are at the relatively simple end of the spectrum, certainly compared to Omnifocus, Obsidian and the like).


Reckon that Reminders has more features than Things these days, and the interface is struggling a bit to keep up.

Natural language recognition for reminders and calendars would be great, particularly if other apps could also use it (find the current implementation in Calendar and Reminders a bit fragile). I tried the AI summarisation/rewriting in Craft and have yet to get anything useful out of it.
Click to expand...
I tried Omnifocus, obsidian, Things, Bear and the like. Interestingly (actually it's funny, lol), the simpler the tools, the more productive I am. So, now mostly I used Apple Notes combined with Apple Calendar and Clock (for alarm).
 
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sgtaylor5 said:
Try Agenda. On the Mac right sidebar there is a timeline which is a combination of Apple reminders and calendar entries. One of the nice things about Agenda, which is a date based notes app, is you can set a reminder for a specific paragraph in a note.
Organization in Agenda is by category - project - note. Notes can have dates attached to them or not; my daily journal notes have dates attached to them. Any note that has a deadline should have a date attached to it, but reference notes don’t need a date attached to them and they work just fine.
EDIT: In the app is an icon to take you to the Agenda Community; a Discourse-based forum. I'd make an account using an email address that isn't your AppleID. That works better, because that Agenda account (used for Premium features -> 1 year of a subscription gives you 12 months of additional Premium Features, yours to keep forever) also serves as your Community forum login.
Click to expand...

it looks interesting but i’ll be honest im probably the type who needs an ai assistant i can talk to or at least have do all the busy work and not have to sit at my apps managing a deluge of tasks and dates/times.

but i will look into this as i do enjoy these threads in my search for something that works
 
Abazigal said:
Fantastical is having a 20% off their annual sub if you subscribe via daring fireball.

flexibits.com

Flexible Mac, iOS, and Windows Apps

Fantastical and Cardhop: enjoyable calendar and contacts apps for Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro. Fantastical is also available on Windows.
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Click to expand...
That 20% off is good for 2 years billed 1 year at a time.
 
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ipedro said:
You forgot “Reminders”. Stick with me for a second. I’ve used Things since it launched in iPhone OS 2.0 with the App Store. I love it. But I noticed recently how far Reminders has come, pretty much matching everything I use Things for, plus it’s native and works seamlessly with Siri and all Apple devices.
It took a bit of unlearning some of the workarounds Things has to do to sync Siri, Reminders and Calendar but the longer I use Reminders, the less likely I’m to go back to Things. Have a second look if you wrote it off in previous years.
Click to expand...

Same for me. I own Things, but seeing how I need to "upgrade" to Things 3 to get some of the features back (for example, Sync is now disabled and the app tells me to upgrade), Apple Reminders started to look really attractive. And I know it will continue to work indefinitely, unlike Things.
 
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ipedro said:
I use the Getting things done method by David Allen. Getting things out of your head the minute you think about them is critical, even if you’re not assigning dates to them. An Inbox is important, as is trusting yourself to reviewing it, at least once a week. Things was the first productivity app to be inspired by GTD and offer the appropriate tools. I was surprised to find that Reminders now had the capabilities to do everything I needed it to, with a couple of improvements over Things:

  1. Siri, no fuss, no porting things over. Because it’s important to get things out of my head, I just call them out if I’m at home with HomePods in every room, or hold the Digital Crown on my Watch if I’m somewhere else. It lands in an InboX in Reminders.
  2. Draggable tasks to calendar. At least, once a week, I’ll drag tasks from my Inbox to my Calendar. Things gained this ability on Mac recently, but Reminders does it on iPad too, which is how I organize my days: leaning back on a couch on my iPad, with reminders and Calendar side-by-side.
Yes, I make good use of scheduled reminders, but primarily for repetitive tasks. Pay the rent and bills, do my finances, weekend home reset (dozens of tasks on this weekly project), water plants, and importantly, a reminder to review my inbox.

I’d go deeper but this post is getting long. I’ll end by saying that Things has a beautiful UI and fun animations, a real surprise and delight feel to it. Reminders has a nice UI but in a different way. It’s been getting lots of attention from Apple and I look forward to even more improvements. It was not easy “cheating on” my 15 year relationship with Things, but Reminders looks like it’ll stick.
Click to expand...
Thank you for your detailed reply! I just tried to “drag and drop” a Reminder into Calendar, and even on the iPhone it is possible! Cool!
 
ChatGPT is really good. Hoping to see Siri improve in 2024. Will try out Fantastical.
 
Motion or Reclaim. Both subscription models. For me, Reclaim didn’t hold up but for anyone with ADHD Motion is a huge productivity boost.
 
Zest28 said:
Same for me. I own Things, but seeing how I need to "upgrade" to Things 3 to get some of the features back (for example, Sync is now disabled and the app tells me to upgrade), Apple Reminders started to look really attractive. And I know it will continue to work indefinitely, unlike Things.
Click to expand...
I mean Things 3 came out in 2017 (and Things 2 2012), you can hardly blame the developers for dropping support by this stage. It's not like they've been milking upgrades either (or worse forcing a subscription; that'll be the day I move to Reminders).

Of course use whatever you want, and Reminders is pretty great (I'm sure I'll give it another shot when the next version of MacOS comes out, as I do every year).
 
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jujoje said:
I mean Things 3 came out in 2017 (and Things 2 2012), you can hardly blame the developers for dropping support by this stage. It's not like they've been milking upgrades either (or worse forcing a subscription; that'll be the day I move to Reminders).

Of course use whatever you want, and Reminders is pretty great (I'm sure I'll give it another shot when the next version of MacOS comes out, as I do every year).
Click to expand...

Please, Things 3 was mostly an UI change, it was not a new app at all. It was not worth to call it "Things 3" as it was fundamentally the same app basically.

Even for real legacy software that I own (not a UI change like Things 3 did), they still continue to work fine in 2023. Those developers did not disable features themselves to try force people to upgrade.

So yeah, I'm sticking with Apple Reminders.
 
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paulrudy said:
Calendar366 is awesome. I've used it on all my devices since Fantastical went to a subscription model.

Also, GoodTask, despite a somewhat clunky UI, is a workhorse. Super reliable, customizable, works seamlessly with Reminders (except for tags, which Apple seems to refuse to open up an API for).
Click to expand...

Is it multi-platform ?
 
FelineTech said:
I used to be a Things and Fantastical user. As of iOS 17, I’ve completely moved to Apple Calendar app and Reminders app. I’ve used some automation scripts in Shortcuts to solve one Reminders limitation, but otherwise both apps work great. All of the data is end-to-end encrypted when Advanced Data Protection is enabled.
Click to expand...
I see Things mentioned a lot in articles but rarely in forums. It’s a lot of money so interested in your take on it?
 
m53rd said:
That’s an interesting way to spell “hit-or-miss.”
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Shasterball said:
The article really shouldn't claim that ChatGPT is reliable.
Click to expand...

if you use these tools correctly, there’s nothing wrong with their reliability. They are not encyclopedia or knowledge databases to ask for factual information. They are large language models and should be used as such. Nothing wrong with critical thinking and crosschecking multiple sources. But if you downplay generative AI, you are entirely missing the revolution that these tools will bring in the next few years.
 
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iPad mini would be better with the best cameras and reduce the edge/side spacing for the app grid.
 
Apple_Robert said:
$150 is a lot of money for the app, in my opinion. There is no option to sign in with Apple and data is kept on their servers.
Click to expand...

You can sync your data to your own (WebDav) server. For me living in Europe this is also faster as the Omni servers are in the US.

Note: in Omnifocus 4 WebDav syncing is not working well (strange because in Omnifocus 3 it is working fine), hopefully they can fix this soon.
 
Here is my top 5 list:

Drafts - my writing hub;

Bear - note app with great UI;

Things 3 -simple and looks great;

Timepage - replaced Fantastical after their recent price hike. Use it together with Drafts/Action (Add to calendar) - so it effectively works like a calendar with natural language processing:). Moreover, it looks stunning;

GPT - no comments here, from brainstorming to proofreading - simply the best )
 
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I use the vastly improved over the years Apple Notes, Calendar, and Mail. I did add Calalarm to nag me because I would miss Calendar alarms. I’m now set on my ipad.
 
9.99 for iPhone, 19.99 for iPad, 49.99 for Mac? What a rip-off that you have to purchase the App on every device 🤦🏻‍♂️
 
I use 4 of these 5 apps regularly (only one I don't use is ChatGPT).

  • Streaks is my favorite app by far - it has had a significant positive impact on my health and habits.
  • Things is the best task tracking app I've ever used. My only small gripe is that you can't separate your tasks and projects into separate accounts/areas (i.e. work vs personal).
  • Fantastical is a great way to consolidate my personal and work calendars. The natural language interface for creating new calendar entries is incredibly powerful once you get the hang of it.
  • I use Obsidian but I'm not crazy about it. Maybe I just haven't taken the time to learn the markup language. I'd also rather not pay $60/year just to sync across devices.
 
My Fav Apps:

1- Things: It's so worth what I've payed to have it on all my devices. My no.1 fav app! It keeps me well organized.
2- DayOne: all kinds of notes, long and short, goes into this. Love it! No.2 of fav apps!
3- 1Password: It's so worth the subscription to me, for all I want secure.
4- YouTube: A great subscription too. I find new channels of treasures all the time, so love it
5- Strides: Unfortunately I forget too often to bock off activities done, so it's not always accurate. But Things always are, so they overlap each other in a good way.
6-Apple Calendar works good on Mac's, and on iOS I have WeekCal - which I like better on iPhone and iPad's.
 
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