Reminders surface your tasks when you need them, whether based on due date or your location, so nothing ever slips through the cracks.

Reminders: Even the best to-do list app can’t bring structure to your life if you never check the dang thing.

We considered only apps with interfaces that were nice to look at and easy to navigate.

Design: Trying to keep everything in order can quickly become tedious, and an unattractive interface will muck things up even further.

If you don’t have a sensible way to categorize your tasks, the overwhelming fear that you’re forgetting to do something important will just be replaced by the anxiety of not knowing how to prioritize your responsibilities.

Organization: We favored apps that offered features like subtasks, projects, and task labels to keep all your work tidy and in the right place.

We preferred apps that displayed tasks alongside calendar events, but we also considered any app that plugged into calendars from Google Calendar, iCloud, or other services. This makes it easier to triage your workload effectively.

Calendar integration: Apps that integrate with your existing calendar, whether by showing the day’s events above the daily tasks or having a separate calendar tab, give a better overview of all the information you need to best determine how to tackle your work.

The natural language input is also top-notch, as the app easily understands and fills out all of the appropriate fields while you type out something as simple as 'Have lunch with Mom at In-N-Out on Tuesday at 2 p.m. For example, you can have work calendars viewable while you're at work, but personal ones when you're at home. If you are running multiple calendars at once, things can get gnarly - Fantastical lets you customize sets of calendars to view at once, and they can even be location-based, so things don't get too crazy when viewing. You can customize your views for daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly, and your agenda of events appear in the sidebar as well. With Fantastical, you are getting a fully functional desktop app that also has a menubar version for quick access. Fantastical has been around for several years now, and even though it has switched to a subscription model, it remains the favorite calendar app for many of us here at iMore.

Mac todolist app