I want to go over the apps I use on my iPhone, iPad and Windows PCs (work and personal) to stay productive on a day-to-day basis. This is meant to serve as an opinionated article on the apps I use. Please make sure to use what works for you and not what works for me. I wanted to give people ideas on apps that may work for them. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Emails
I get a lot of these on a daily basis and I need a good, easy, way to manage them. I also am not willing to pay for a service that has been free my entire life. So, I use the Spark Mail app by Readdle.
The app is very clean looking and works well when you are working cross platform. The biggest reason why I use it is because I can read and manage emails from one device and the notification automatically gets dismissed on the other. For example, I can read and manage emails on my iPad and the notification automatically gets dismissed on my iPhone, Apple Watch, and PCs.
I can also sign in with Google (which I have) and all of my other accounts that are connected are signed in as well. I find these features to be super important. It is very smooth on every device and overall works very well. Highly recommend! 👍🏻
Notes / Journals / Logs / Habit Tracking
This is a tricky one. This is the one I trip over the most. I went with OneNote. I ultimately decided on it because no other app can come close to the features that I need in a Notes app.
Those features are as follows:
- Handwriting + Handwriting Recognition
- Cross Platform Syncing via PC & iPad/iPhone
- Typed Text + Ability to change the font on the fly
- OCR for a better Search Experience
- Audio Transcriptions
- Backups (automated or otherwise)
Other apps like Obsidian can do some (or all) of these features. Obsidian itself can do all of them the problem is the process is difficult with you having to find the right plugins and make sure that the devs are updating those plugins (for bugfixes and whatnot) which they don’t have to do since they are all hobby projects. On top of that, sync (even with the built-in solution) is a pain to set up and make sure it works flawlessly and overall… unless you are just typing in Obsidian and maybe using images.. everything in Obsidian is difficult to do. You need to have a technical brain and when I am journaling, I want to turn that off and just use my non-technical side since I use my technical side 99% of the time anyway.
Apple Notes has a lot of these though using it on PC sucks because you can’t paste text, images, or anything else into notes or copy images out of notes. Handwriting syncs as images to iCloud.com and you just have very basic access. It is a great app if you are all-in on Apple devices but as someone who uses Windows as well it does not work very well.
So, OneNote is the winner. I wish Microsoft would update it to make it more modern and allow for custom tags to sync between devices. Either way, I will always have a Windows PC (because gaming is better on Windows, for now) which means I will not be missing any features. I just have to go to my Windows device if I want all of the features. Slightly annoying but fine.
Tasks / Reminders / To Dos
This is the last type of app that runs my life. For me that is Apple Reminders. I have tried Todoist, Things 3, Superlist, keeping them written down, keeping them in my notes app and so much more. I keep coming back to Reminders for 3 features (that no other app can do the way Apple does it cause that is how Apple designed their software):
- Location Based Reminders (e.g. When I get home remind me to find X)
- People based Reminders (e.g. When I am texting my husband remind me to ask him to X)
- Background Syncing
Those are 3 types of reminders I use more than I thought I did. Todoist has location based but they have a major bug (that they blame on Apple – may or may not be true). The easiest way to explain the bug is like this… Let’s say you have a task to exercise when you get home at 5pm during the week. Then let’s say you get home from work for lunch at 12pm and use that time to exercise instead of eat. So, you check off the task at 12, exercise, go back to work, everything is good. When you get home from work at 5pm, you will be notified again for the task you already completed. Supposedly, there is some bug on Apple’s side that causes this to happen. I reported it to Todoist and they are unable (or unwilling – again unsure what is true here) to fix it.
People based and Background Syncing no other apps are able to do because of how locked down iOS devices are. They are useful when you go to check off a reminder on one device and don’t want to be reminded about it again on any other device. It syncs in the background. The people based is just handy.
The fact that the grocery list can be shared with my husband and auto-sorts itself is useful. Reminders, overall, does what it needs to do, nothing more and does it well. I’ve never had issues with sync between devices. If I absolutely need it on my PC, I can login to iCloud.com (which still sucks) so I am not SOL with access there. I highly recommend using the basic apps for a few weeks and seeing if you need more. You may be pleasantly surprised with how well they work for you.
What apps do you use? What do you think of the apps I use?