It’s not Apple’s fault – it’s right there in the name: Reminders. Reminders isn’t built to scale for people who manage dozens of projects and collaborate with others to assign tasks and keep track of due dates. And soon after my daily schedule was altered to include all these new individual and collaborative tasks, Reminders showed its limitations and I completely lost track of what I needed to do, with whom, and when. In short, I took on new projects, increased my efforts on existing ones, and I started collaborating with more people. And, following the launch of Relay FM, I renewed my committent to our two podcasts – Connected and Virtual – as I want to make better shows every week. Then, in August, Graham and I began outlining the details of what would become the weekly MacStories newsletter that we send out every Friday (we haven’t missed a single week so far). For three months, I tested apps (over 50), talked to developers, and spent my days writing and organizing coverage with my team.Īt the same time, my girlfriend and I started looking for a new apartment in Rome, which, as you can guess, also is a time-consuming process with lots of planning and collaboration involved. I expanded the team’s scope to include articles from new freelance writers, and I settled on about 20 in-depth articles we needed to have ready by iOS 8 release day. I decided early on that I wanted the MacStories team completely focused on iOS 8 for the whole summer, and that meant that I had to start talking to dozens of developers and PR people to test new apps, ask questions, and write reviews. I consider Fantastical one of the best apps ever made for iOS, and it served me well throughout 2013 and the first half of this year (so much that I even recommended it to my doctor).Īround five months ago – immediately after Apple’s WWDC ‘14 – I started putting together MacStories’ plan for the launch of iOS 8 because I knew that, for me and our audience, the changes we’d see in the OS were going to be something special.
Todoist vs reminders pro#
The underlying backend was stable and straightforward so I didn’t have to worry about my tendency to fiddle and optimize productivity instead of being productive, but Fantastical was also flexible enough for me to be faster with keyboard shortcuts, Launch Center Pro actions, and a simpler visualization of tasks through a unified list and a thoughtful use of colors. So when Flexibits brought Reminders support to Fantastical for the iPhone and iPad, I was fully immersed in the Fantastical ecosystem for events and todos.įor more than a year, Reminders and Fantastical were the perfect combination for me. I was using Apple’s native Reminders app for the iPhone and iPad, but I wasn’t a fan of it: while Apple’s app covered the basics well and it first featured a widget in iOS 7’s Notification Center, it didn’t come with the natural language input and the great balance of simplicity and power-user details found in Flexibits’ app.
More importantly, iCloud sync was surprisingly fast and reliable, and Reminders worked with Fantastical. My todos consisted of lists of links to apps/news/emails I needed to check out, and Reminders offered just the right amount of functionality for an individual user who was tired of more complex apps. Reminders had everything I wanted: I could create multiple lists, there were no contexts and projects to learn, I could assign due dates, and task notes supported clickable URLs. So about two years ago, I switched to iCloud Reminders as my primary todo app, telling mysef that I’d never cede to the temptation of optimizing my task list again. I was removing friction from the app, but the time I spent tweaking and hacking around could have been used completing tasks rather than coming up with ways to make them prettier and geekier. I wrote scripts, changed its settings, played with the URL scheme – I tweaked OmniFocus because I could and because it was fun. OmniFocus is an excellent suite of apps – especially with the new version 2.0 for OS X and iOS 8 – but, because of its high customizability, I was constantly finding excuses to fiddle and improve instead of doing and moving on. It started in late 2012 after I realized that I was spending more time tweaking OmniFocus than getting stuff done. Contrary to expectations from Internet friends and colleagues who swore by more complex solutions, I was fine with Reminders and I didn’t need anything more. For over two years, I used Apple’s Reminders as my task management app.
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