For many of us, our entire lives are organized on our phones. From arranging meetings with friends to planning your upcoming job, knowing what’s on your plate is usually just a few taps away.
The problem is that it usually involves tons of different apps, which means you have to jump from one to the next to check one task off the list. It’s a real hassle and makes managing the tasks seem like more work than the tasks themselves.
In my case, I’ve been using the Apple Calendar app for a long time as an impromptu work tracker, where I manually add each day to the calendar as an all-day event. The problem with this approach is that there is no way to mark the job as complete. At the same time, I’ve been using an app called Avaza to track project progress using a set of kanban boards, and this allows me to move tasks from “to do,” “in progress,” “completed,” and so on.
And like everything that, I also use the GoodTask app for reminders. This is an amazing app and does a great job of keeping me informed of what I need to do, but I don’t feel like it fully integrates with my work scheduling system.
As you can see, it’s a very time-consuming way to stay on top of my day. It has worked so far, but seems extremely ineffective. Luckily, I found an app that could fix that mess once and for all.
The true successor to Wunderlist
The app is called Superlist. Created by the same people who made the once-popular Wunderlist (since bought and discontinued by Microsoft), Superlist is a beautiful all-in-one space for your tasks, reminders, and more. This means that there is no need to constantly switch between multiple apps when one can do the job perfectly well.
I’m impressed with some of Superlist’s practical features. It can turn any email from my Gmail inbox into a task in the app—all you have to do is star the email, mark it as important, or add the Superlist tag to it. It’s great for keeping track of things without diving into my (admittedly messy) inbox. What’s more, Superlist can also condense those emails using artificial intelligence to make things even more concise and digestible.
Home screen heroes
This is part of a regular series of articles exploring the apps we couldn’t live without. Read them all here.
Superlist works on iOS, macOS, Android and the web, so I can use it on more or less any device. Although it sends tasks to Google Calendar and not Apple’s Calendar app, I’ve added my Google account to Apple Calendar, which means my tasks still show up if I want to check Apple’s app.
I also appreciate how Superlist gives you so much for free. While you can pay for additional integrations (like Slack, GitHub, and Figma), more file storage, and an AI list builder, the full version has everything I need. This includes unlimited tasks, notes and reminders, as well as unlimited private lists. It has all the integrations I need (namely Gmail, Google Calendar, and an email forwarding link), and there’s even a little artificial intelligence thrown in for free in the form of the aforementioned email digests.
And it’s not just ideal for work. You can use it to track your progress on a DIY project, make sure you’re on top of your daily habits, plan vacations, or anything else. It’s also full of collaboration tools, making it just as useful for groups of friends as it is for teams and businesses.
Superlist isn’t perfect, and while it did a great job of solving an annoying problem in my workflow, there are still a few details I wish were different. For one thing, it adds tasks to my Google Calendar instead of using its own in-app calendar, and offering the latter would mean there’d be no reason for me to switch apps at all – right now I still have to search for my task calendar in another app.
It would also be nice to have support for Apple Shortcuts. I don’t currently use a ton of shortcuts, but I can see a ton of ways that integrating them into my tasks could potentially increase my productivity.
Despite these minor complaints, I’m enthusiastic about incorporating Superlist more thoroughly into my daily life. It might not be able to download everything I need – at least not yet – but it’s helping me build a much more streamlined system that doesn’t require me to constantly jump between three different apps. That alone gave it a well-deserved place on my home screen.
Download Superlist at iOS and Android.