Boosting your productivity with apps

By Vito Fabrizio Brugnola | keep_it_digital | 23 Feb 2020

HoWandering memory and productivity: using some apps

I have not so good daily memory. You could ask me what I had for lunch yesterday and, probably, I cannot give you an answer before 15 minutes of mumbling. So, what is the solution for this wandering memory?

What if you like to be productive as a Soviet factory worker? You have to remember what your daily quests are. Let's use some apps to boost our productivity. I'm not a guru, so I do not give advice about what app is better: just giving you the menu man, then you choose!

1. Todoist

Simple and effective. Todoist has a free version that is enough to do everything you need. You can put how many tasks you want and classify them via priority and type that you have previously defined. You can also set up recurring activities and nested ones. Every activity can be synchronized with Google Calendar, which is fundamental.

One of the features I appreciate the most in Todoist is the Karma system, which is a simple gamification feature. Simply using Todoist gives you karma points, that tell you are a good boy/girl. My actual karma rank is Great Master, so call me Yoda, b*t*h! Guess what? This is my favorite app.

2. Habitica

Marvelous concept! If Todoist has a gamification feature, Habitica is practically a game. You start with an avatar. Then, by adding and complete tasks you receive XPs and money. So, the more productive you are, the stronger the avatar becomes. If you fail too much, he dies, so it is your fault, and you have disappointed us all and your girlfriend will leave you for an illiterate redneck.

Once you reach the 10th level you can choose also your PG's class: mage, warrior, rogue or the 4th class I cannot remember. Maybe the illiterate-redneck.

You can also go social and assembly a team: like the Avengers, but in 8-bit. With your nerdy team you can go on mission, defeat not-so-epic bosses and unlock a golden sword or s**t like that to improve your stats. A little too nerdy to me, but amazing idea.

Look at me daddy! I'm playing and I'm also become a better person!

3. Google Task

A soulless task manager. No gamification. I do not want to spend any other word about it.

4. Microsoft ToDo

Nice try, Microsoft! Anyway, much better than GTask. No gamification, so 0.0 sense of purpose and accomplishment.

5. Notion

What is Notion? A little too complicated, but very complete. Everything in Notion is a database and the app offers also a decent variety of templates. Indeed, its completeness make it not so agile for a task tracker. I use Notion, but only as a diary and as a recipe book.

The free version is limited to a 1k blocks (let's say a block is a piece of homogeneously formatted text, so a Headline 1 is a block, a chunck of paragraph is a block and so on). Then you have to pay 4 bucks monthly. Not so much, but I'm a teacher and educators can have unlimited Notion blocks for free, 'cause we are special.

Habits vs tasks

Become a better person is a difficult journey. In the case you are a lazy-ass person, maybe you want to focus on increasing the number of things you accomplish on a daily basis, so something like Todoist can be useful, especially if you like to be rewarded for your struggle.

In the case you want to improve your life by quitting bad habits or assuming good ones, I suggest to track your habits: you can use Habitica or a generical habits tracker if you find Habitica gamification too invasive.