Business is a lot like a well-oiled machine. When you are able to get all of the gears working in unison, things run smoothly and everyone gets their work done on time. However, when even one part of the machine is out of whack or not working properly, it can throw off the entire system and cause problems throughout the entire process.
This is where task management comes in. When you have a clear understanding of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done by, you can ensure that your business functions at its highest potential. This is why we have put together this list of the best apps for task management so that you know exactly how to stay on top of your tasks no matter how many projects you’re working on at once.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Task Management
When it comes to different types of time management software, we’re certainly not starved of choice—and if you’re looking to organize and manage your workload more efficiently long-term, you’ll definitely want to think about investing in a task management app. The right task management tool helps you stay on top of all of your commitments and visualize progress as priorities change.
But of course, not all task management apps are created equal, and whether you intend to use the tool for personal or professional reasons can make a huge difference. To help you find the right solution for your needs, we’ve broken out the main difference between personal and professional task management apps—with best-in-class examples for both.
What are the main differences?
While many task management apps share similar features, they often have very different levels of detail, incorporation and control—and much of this hinges on whether you want to use the tool for professional or personal purposes.
If you want to use a task management app for personal use, you probably only require basic to-do list features to keep on top of things, but if you’re using the app for professional purposes, it’s a whole other ball game. To be able to track progress on work, report on where effort is spent, update status, prioritize tasks and create planning timelines, you’ll likely want feature-rich project management features, as well as budget tracking and time tracking capabilities. Some professional task management apps also let you set deadlines, compare estimated time vs actual time on tasks, and set automatic reminders.
Then of course there’s the issue of whether you’re working as a team or as an individual. Not all task management apps offer team collaboration features, scheduling, and shared visibility. Even as a solo professional, you may want personal goal and milestone features which more basic personal task management apps don’t offer. With these nuances in mind, we’ve pulled together some of the best task management apps for personal and professional use.
Best task management apps for personal use
Remember the milk
One of the most popular simple personal task management apps currently available. As the name suggests, Remember the Milk is designed for staying on top of life’s small to-dos. It’s powerful enough to let you organize task priorities, due dates, repeats, lists and tags, and get reminders via email, text and mobile notifications. You can also share your lists to keep friends and family in the loop, and integrate with Gmail, Google Calendar, Evernote and more.
Google Tasks
With Google Tasks you can manage, capture, and edit your tasks anytime and anywhere, with to-do lists that sync across all your devices. Though this app is simple and clutter-free, you can still add details and sub-tasks. An obvious choice for people who use Google products, Google Task’s integrations with Gmail and Google Calendar make it easy to link up information across your personal online space.
Microsoft Todo
Microsoft To Do is a cloud-based task management app that lets you manage your tasks from a smartphone, tablet and computer. The smart daily planner helps you stay on track, and you can break tasks down into simple steps, add due dates, and set reminders, as well as share your list with friends and family.
Things
One for the Apple crowd. Things is an award-winning personal task management app that helps you achieve your goals. You can use checklists to break down the finer details of a to-do list, view your calendar events with your to-dos, which gives you an outline of your schedule, and plan your week ahead with the new Upcoming feature, which shows everything in your diary for the next week, including scheduled to-dos, deadlines, and calendar events.
Evernote
First and foremost an app for capturing and organising ideas, Evernote also helps you stay on top of your tasks by creating to-dos in your notes, which puts your jobs in context. It also removes the need to switch between notes and a dedicated task management app, which can interrupt your flow. You can even add due dates, reminders and flags to help you stay on track and ensure nothing gets lost.
OmniFocus
One of the more developed personal task management apps, OmniFocus is designed to capture thoughts and ideas and turn them into tasks and to-dos, helping you focus on the right things at the right time. Because it’s deeply integrated with Apple, OmniFocus can become a seamless part of your daily life, and allow you to stay organized on all devices.
Best task management apps for teams
Timely
Unlike most team task management apps, Timely marries task organization and automatic time tracking, helping teams effortlessly visualize progress and see how long different deliverables actually take. Teams simply create or assign new tasks, and drag and drop them to their calendar to plan their schedule. With live progress bars, deadlines, and capacity calculations, everyone can plan work, track progress and manage priorities from one tool.
Todoist
Flexible, agile, and super easy to use, Todoist allows you to create a to-do list on an intuitive note-taking interface, and then assign work from there to your coworkers. You can use the app to upload files, notify people, set recurring due dates, centralize repetitive admin, and even color-code tasks by their level or urgency or importance. There’s even a productivity view called Karma that gamifies your progress against each task.
nTask
As a task management app that allows teams to collaborate, plan, analyze and manage everyday tasks, nTask is popular with both small businesses and individuals. It provides tools that enable collaboration between team members, and makes it easy to generate progress reports, assign tasks, set recurring tasks, and share files.
Microsoft planner
If your team uses Microsoft, you might want to think about using their Planner, which helps you organize teamwork using visual, intuitive and collaborative task management. You can use the app to create content-rich Kanban boards complete with files, checklists and labels, helping everyone on your team feel empowered, no matter their role.
MeisterTask
One of the most popular task management tools for teams is MeisterTask, which provides all team members with an overview of work in progress, from conception to completion. The Kanban-style boards help digitalize workflows, and the Gantt-style timeline helps drive efficiency, ensure deadlines are kept, and keep teams aligned.
Toodledo
Toodledo is a collection of powerful tools that help improve your productivity by creating powerful to-do lists. You can use folders, tags, contexts and subtasks to ensure your lists are organized as competently as possible, and the app also allows you to sort and search through your tasks, create structured outlines, and track your working habits, as well as collaborate with coworkers, friends and family.
best personal task management app
There’s nothing wrong with a paper to-do list, but going digital has benefits. Paper is fine if you enjoy writing by hand, crossing off tasks in ink or pencil, and drawing arrows to show when priorities and deadlines change. A to-do list app lets you write, organize, and reprioritize your tasks more efficiently. They also let you attach notes, links, and files to a task, and many let you see when someone else has completed a task. In many ways, a good to-do app is the ultimate productivity app.
How We Choose the Best To-Do List Apps
To-do list apps are a dime a dozen, and few of them stand out as being much better than others. For example, there are plenty of apps that are excellent for Android or iPhone, but they do you no good when you’re working on a laptop and need to jot down a thought quickly without picking up your phone and losing your place.
Todoist iOS app screens
Todoist’s mobile app
That’s why for this list, we only include apps that you can access on both desktop and mobile devices. After evaluating around 25 possible contenders, we tested and evaluated them and selected the highest-scoring apps to list here.
One of the major points of consideration when testing and scoring is how well these apps help you organize and stay on top of your tasks. We also consider collaboration, meaning the ability to share a to-do list with other people, though we see it as a bonus feature and not a requirement to be included.
We also looked for apps that fit different user profiles, such as people who follow the Getting Things Done (GTD) method of organization (OmniFocus 3 and Toodledo are good choices), or those who prefer writing down tasks using a stream of consciousness (Workflowy is the app that fits the bill there).
One of the most popular to-do list apps, Wunderlist, was acquired by Microsoft in 2015 and taken out of commission five years later. Microsoft’s stated ambition was to build a replacement app for Wunderlist from the ground up, cloning all its best features in the process. The new app, Microsoft To Do, frankly took too long to come to market and arrived half baked, but it has improved noticeably since its debut and may be a good option for people who use other Microsoft apps.
Microsoft To Do
Microsoft To Do
What to Look for in a To-Do List App
There are a few qualities to look for in a to-do app. The top three are:
design,
tools for managing and organizing your tasks, and
collaboration option.s
Design is extra important in this category of apps because you end up looking at your to-do list app often. How are you going to get anything done if you can’t stand looking at your ugly app? A good design also allows the app to feel intuitive so you can write down things that come to mind quickly.
Every to-do list app comes with tools and features for organizing your tasks and lists, and in an ideal world, these features match up with the way you think. For example, if you are a highly visual person, you might find that color-coding your lists or tasks to show priority is important. If you are a deadline-oriented person, you’ll want an app that sorts your tasks by due date and or shows them in a calendar view. If you’re forgetful, you might want an app that sends you reminders on different devices.
As for collaboration, it’s always handy to have the option to share a to-do list. For home use, a collaborative to-do list means you can assign chores to other people or track when someone has purchased items off a shared shopping list. In business settings, collaborative task-management makes working together easier and more transparent.
The Best Free To-Do List App
Several of the best to-do list apps have a robust free tier of service. Of them, our favorites are Asana and Todoist. Asana may be too free-form for some people’s tastes. Todoist has more inherent structure.
Another very good free app is Remember the Milk. It’s a little more old-school in some respects compared with the other apps on this list, but it’s very capable and reliable. It’s also highly intuitive. You can figure out all the ins and outs of this app in minutes.
Many of the other to-do apps on this list are excellent, but their free versions are quite limited compared with the power of their paid versions.
Asana to do lists
Asana’s collaboration features
The Best To-Do List App For Teams
It should come as no surprise that our top picks for teams are also the Editors’ Choices: Todoist Premium (meaning the paid version) and Asana Premium, Business, or Enterprise.
Todoist works best among small groups of people organizing relatively uncomplicated tasks, whereas Asana is better for managing more in-depth teamwork, the kind of work that changes between many hands and passes through a lot of phases before it’s complete.
OmniFocus 3
OmniFocus 3
To-Do Lists vs. Project Management
An ongoing challenge in the world of software is deciding what gets classified as a project management app and what fits into other categories, such as to-do list apps and work-management apps.
We take the view that project management apps must be designed to specifically manage project-based work and offer Gantt charts. Project-based work means a series of tasks that has a start date, end date, and deliverable. Building a house is a project. Sending a rocket to the moon is a project. Answering support emails, however, is a series of ongoing tasks and not a project.
Occasionally, we encounter an app that straddles more than one category. Here, Asana is that app. It now includes tools for traditional project management, but it also works perfectly well as a to-do list app.
Overall, project management apps and collaborative to-do apps serve the same general purpose but at a much different scale. They both keep track of what needs to get done, when, and by whom. They help people manage time more efficiently and regulate how many tasks are assigned to each person on a team. Project management apps help large groups of people juggle schedules, resources, and budgets in a way that to-do list apps can’t. To-do apps are simpler and cost less than project management software. For many types of work to-do apps are a better fit.
Use Your To-Do List to Get Organized
Having a great to-do list app can help you get organized and get more done, whether you want to manage personal tasks or those of a family or small team.
A to-do app is only as useful as the information you put into it, so in addition to picking the right app, you might also want to peruse these tips for creating better to-do lists. If you’re looking to share to-dos, you might also want to look at our story on how to make a family to-do list and calendar.
Conclusion
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