1st May, 2024
Best daily planner apps help us get organized with tasks, calendar & even meetings. Here's the best planner apps for daily planning in 2024 and ones to explore for managing tasks and calendar in one this year.
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Do you ever need to balance calendar and tasks in one place?
Well, this is a real thing. For some people, to-do applications aren't enough and don't provide that way to time-block on a calendar, but for others calendar apps don't allow them task management they need to get organized for the week ahead.
A new breed called daily planner apps have appeared in the last few years and we've brought them all together to give you the ultimate list of the best daily planner apps for work and life.
A daily planner app has 50% tasks and 50% calendar abilities.
Daily planner apps are basically a combination of a to-do list app and a calendar app allowing you to see your tasks alongside your schedule of the day ahead.
This is becoming much more popular as people like to see their daily schedule in front of them with a set of to-dos on that list. So what's the best app for daily scheduling? Well there are a few daily planner applications that we've tried and tested and wanted to go over with you in this feature and how to choose the best daily planner app for you.
Here's all the daily planners with reviews and explorations to why we picked them:
Motion is a well-known AI assistant and been growing in popularity in the last few years. Those who have higher budgets and a more "assistant" based approach to task management will look into Motion for helping them re-focus their tasks and calendar.
Motion has a unique experience for planning your schedule by allowing you to add task details including deadlines, priorities, start dates, working time and duration to help assist the AI in making an effective decision to re-schedule, if needed, any of your tasks.
Motion offers a good balance between being a task management app and a project management software, with ClickUp or monday.com type features that allow you to plan your tasks in Kanban, table and assign them to other people using Motion for teams.
There's many features in Motion and the best is the AI abilities. Auto-scheduling is perfect for someone who wants to plan their tasks and get the AI to do the work of allocating them into the system - then setting up rules in settings to defend the important things.
Motion does have team abilities which allow you to expand into project management, but compared to tools like ClickUp and monday.com, this is like baby project management software, so light compared to it. So we recommend this more for smaller teams. Check out our extensive list of the best project management software for more on that.
A combination of tasks, calendar, meeting scheduling & team collaboration in one
Availability: Windows, macOS, web, iOS & Android
Akiflow appears on this list as it oozes daily planning and bleeds this all the way through their product. You can add tasks to your inbox, plan them ahead with upcoming, organize them in kanban view and tag them with labels (like lists). With calendar, it is there, front and centre and perfect for dragging those tasks in your system into your calendar.
Time-blocking is better than Motion in our opinion with Akiflow as the task-calendar match-up works so well here, but Akiflow does lack the AI nature than Motion brings.
Task consolidation explained simply is the ability to consolidate your tasks in one place. Think all your tasks under one roof. Akiflow wants to do that for you, a dashboard for your work meaning you can bring in tasks from places like Slack (messages that pop up), Gmail (starred emails that matter) or maybe even your team's ClickUp tasks in projects that are urgent for you. This is a game-changer if you hate using your project management app at work.
Routine is a beautiful looking app but presents a good way to plan your tasks, calendar and a lighter notes - all in one base. Routine has a feature called "console" which we recommend looking at for quick macOS capturing.
Routine brings a friendly tool for bringing all your tasks, calendar and note lists in one location. It won't replace a fully fledged note-taking application, but it will be handy for sorting and capturing small notes for lists - like movies to watch, articles to read etc.
Sunsama is an outstanding planner app that focuses more on your wellbeing and guided planning. With features that hand-hold you, Sunsama is a better way to help you plan the week ahead and build better habits into your routine. Sunsama wants you to stop working when work is done and not overload yourself throughout a day.
Sunsama lacks a fully fledged mobile application which is always a point of contention. Some people love this because you can use Sunsama as a read-only type app, whereas others who use the tools on the go, don't like this and opt for tools like Motion and Akiflow that offer better and more functional mobile applications for daily planning with.
Ellie Planner is truly an application that gets that balance between daily planner and to-do list application but in a much more approachable way.
Unlike Sunsama and Akiflow it doesn't scream hideous amounts of features, but what it does is create a week view into what's ahead, uses systems like time-boxing and brain dumping to make a productive way to plan ahead for your week and better align tasks going forward. We really like Ellie Planner for this, but it is also independently developed which makes it even more friendly.
Ellie Planner has recently added ways to integrate with apps like Todoist, Slack & Notion.
Ellie Planner brings a good amount of features but nowhere near the amount that tools like Sunsama and Akiflow bring together. What you will get is nice features that provide function.
Ellie Planner is one of our listed Sunsama alternatives. Here's our video above.
Structured is a mobile-focused experience on macOS, iOS and soon Android that brings a timeline like view to your day ahead. Very similar to another app called Sorted 3.
Trying to be the base of lightweight daily planning, Structured helps to give your day and week clarity with a more timeline based approach to your daily task management. Despite being a cracking daily planner app for iOS - it also offers a decent MacOS app too.
Sunsama is a more mindful approach to tasks, with features like "shutdown" allowing you to debrief on your day and then turn off Sunsama. Hand-holding task assistance too, so you can plan your day with more help and even tasks connected to "week objectives" too.
Timestripe is a goal planning application that offers a unique approach to task management and daily planning by offering you a window into the next day, and the next year and even your life time goals. Planning with this in mind changes your approach to goals and daily planning as it helps to align your long-term goals with your short-term.
There is a calendar experience in this tucked away that allows you to plot your "goals" or tasks into the week ahead and makes planning ahead much more appealing when you can see goals for the month or year aligned alongside you.
Todoist is the best-in-class to do application in our opinion. It provides a brilliant way to handle tasks, manage project lists and even use a kanban board to plot out ideas.
With over 10 years of experience, Todoist brings a high quality application that makes task management much easier. The reason it lives on this list is that Todoist are getting calendar mode soon and this is one of the best tools for tasks, it will do the same for calendar and daily planning too with the view.
TickTick is one of the best friendly, approachable budget to-do apps that actually, unlike Todoist, has a calendar experience within this at the time of our posting. TickTick brings the ability to plot tasks in the calendar view with week, month and day modes to better align tasks into the right time. The issue is that this comes only in the paid plan.
Calendar mode is one of the big features in TickTick that allow us to feature it as a daily planner application. For many people some light calendar mode might be enough for them to consider TickTick as their planner application as it has due dates, progress bars and also fantastic ways to capture on multiple devices too.
Habit tracking is great for making sure you create healthy routines. This is a bonus feature of TickTick but allows it to be another layer into the daily planning system. Habits can help build healthy routines and use the application longer too.
Morgen is a calendar application at heart but it has been trying to bring both calendar and task into one hub. Whilst it isn't a pure breed daily planner application, we think it still is an option as you enter your decision making when looking for a daily planner application.
That combination between calendar events first and tasks, with task lists with the ability to time-block them into your calendar actually makes it a not bad solution. For one calendar it is free to use which makes it perfect for getting started and using the concept of tasks and calendar together without investing in some of the options above that do limit you.
Eager to learn Morgen, we've got a course to help your learn Morgen calendar.
Morgen is a great tool for calendar management but it does allow you to bring in tasks. The best feature for this is that fact you can time-block those tasks into your calendar really easily but also that you can organize them into project lists using task lists.
Meeting scheduling for planning meetings means you don't need tools like Calendly as the tool can be used to setup routine meetings and even meetings on the go too. Worth exploring as an option for meeting planning, calendar management and task management if you plan light weight tasks and like to time block in your calendar app.
People are flocking to daily planner applications for more structure in their task management. this is becoming a trend in the market as people want more help with managing a typical work day. Here's a few of the benefits of using a daily planner app:
They normally give you better structure, help & view of your day ahead.
Picking from this list might be overwhelming, combine that with the task management apps out there that you have to sift through. I'd recommend going down this list:
Akiflow is another on this list that helps you to plan, but focuses a lot on the combination of calendar and tasks in one hub pulling tasks from other sites too. Matching to things you struggle with will help.
Need something more mindful, Sunsama could be practical for setting daily limits on your workload and helping hold your hand during planning the next day.
Want something iOS based? Structured presents a smart daily planner that will be better for those on the go.
We'd recommend looking at what your needs are. If you are time-poor and need something to re-organize your day ahead, Motion is a good tool for that with a AI/machine learning ability to help do that.
In essence, with a daily planner app, you want a reliable way to see your calendar and tasks. Anything on the top of this is a bonus to be honest - so when you're looking at these recommendations from our list, remember the following notes:
Useful notes before you explore the range of daily planners listed below.
We've not ranked these tools above, but this will give you a good list of daily planner apps to make sure you have the right one for work and life planning. You can use these in any walk of life, so don't limit your thinking to work only. We covered this on our YouTube too.
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