Looking for the right iOS app to help organize my life
June 8, 2014 2:20 PM   Subscribe

I'm heading to graduate school soon and I'm trying to develop good habits and a good routine in preparation for that change. I've never been good with physical planners (I lose them or forget to write in them) but I always have my iPad so I'm trying to find an app that meets my needs and could use some input.

I already have Planner Plus. It's good for keeping track of events, of specific times and dates and deadlines and I use it for that with some success.

What I really want, though, is something to help with this sort of weekly plan/checklist that I want to start keeping. To give you a clearer example, this is what I made in Reminders today. The problem with this is that the list headings will have to change with each week, due to the date, as will the subtext on each listed reminder. Changing the subtext involves changing the reminder start and end date. Furthermore, adding a new reminder means I have to do all these steps all over again. It's clunky and clunkiness and inefficiency will derail my attempts to get organized.

What I'd like is some sort of list system that allows me to create lists of weekly goals. I could set options for these lists, like daily reminders by an alarm, inclusion in the pulldown Notification screen, or some other hard-to-ignore presentation, ideally with color coding. That way, I don't need to set options for the individual goals themselves, all I have to do is change the list's date.

Do y'all know of anything like this? I know this is kind of a weird request and pretty specific but any help would be appreciated.
posted by Modica to Computers & Internet (9 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
You might want to check out Workflowy, on the one hand, it is very flexible, but it possibly could be too much so for what you want to do.
posted by 4ster at 2:27 PM on June 8, 2014


Do you want to keep the records of whether or not you completed all your tasks in each list, each week, or not? If your lists usually contain an unchanging (mostly) group of tasks, and you don't want to keep a permanent record, HomeRoutines might work for you. (Self-link, but it seems it may be a fit. Despite the houseworky tone and name, it's good for all sorts of repeaty stuff)

You create a list of repeating tasks, called a Routine, and then you can choose to have its completion status reset every week (or not), and also to have reminders every day, or every weekday etc, at a time you choose.
posted by slightlybewildered at 5:45 PM on June 8, 2014


I use Omnifocus. It's incredibly full-featured and has a companion app for Macs, if you have a Mac computer as well — but you don't need the Mac app to use the iOS app. It is relatively expensive for an iOS app, but for me it's been worth it.

Another option might be Trello
posted by brentajones at 5:48 PM on June 8, 2014


Response by poster: The tasks will most likely be changing week by week as I progress through some of the tasks that I need to work through and settle into a smoother pattern.
posted by Modica at 5:52 PM on June 8, 2014


Response by poster: As far as I can tell, Omnifocus is not out for the iPad Retina Mini, which is what I have.

HomeRoutines looks alright, too, but I wish I could try it before buying it because I have some quibbles with the way it works based on the images.

Trello is really interesting...I wonder if it would be excessive? But with some of these tasks, I could easily attach further information to them...

WorkFlowy is way too barebones and overly flexible for me.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, guys! Any others?
posted by Modica at 6:20 PM on June 8, 2014


Todoist might be worth a look for you?
posted by lokta at 6:58 PM on June 8, 2014


Ah, interesting; I didn't realize they'd removed the Omnifocus iPad app from the store. I've been using version 1 and it works just fine. Didn't even realize they were that close to a 2.0.

Sorry about that.
posted by brentajones at 7:07 PM on June 8, 2014


Response by poster: I think I found one, I didn't like Todoist but it led me to the very clean ToDo app. This one is pretty much exactly what I wanted. Still trying to figure out some of the kinks but if it weren't for y'all and your suggestions I wouldn't have found it so thank ya kindly.
posted by Modica at 10:29 PM on June 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Late to the party, but I see no one recommended Things, which was how I survived grad school.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:10 AM on June 9, 2014


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