I have been on the look out for my productivity apps and I finally found them. I did some soul searching over the last few weeks and stopped with ALL productivity apps altogether. It, surprisingly, wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I didn’t write anything down I didn’t need to and when I did I just used Apple Notes and they were just scratch notes I will, eventually, maybe someday delete.  They were just like those sticky notes you need for a minutes and can trash.

Anyway, I stopped with the apps and I thought for days (made sure this wasn’t an overnight thing) what I needed out of a productivity apps.

These are my needs for my task management app:

• Deadlines
• Reminders
• Headlines/Sections
• Recurring Tasks
• Board View
• Attachments
• Notes Area
• Free or already paid for One-Time Purchase.

These are my needs for my notes app:

• Cross-Platform so I can access notes or anything else on ANY device (PC, Mac, iPad, etc.)
• Callouts & Code Blocks so I can store things in different ways.
• Free or already paid for One-Time Purchase.
• Works with the Apple Pencil

As you can see I don’t have many needs so A LOT of apps meet my needs until you get to the free or already paid for one-time purchase item. I don’t have many already paid for one-time purchase apps and there aren’t many free apps these days. So, these are the apps I decided on.

My Apps

Apple Reminders

Since Things 3 is only getting bugfixes (even with iOS18 coming, they have nothing in the works for testflight users even) I don’t find Things 3 useful anymore. Also, Todoist has too many features for me that I don’t need. I don’t need my tasks cross platform anymore as my current work Macbook Pro is not locked down and my future personal computer will be another Macbook Pro. I also don’t need multiple reminders for 1 task.

The biggest thing that bothers me is that because of how Apple implements 3rd party apps, Todoist cannot have location-based recuring tasks work correctly. It will notify you of a task due tomorrow if you complete the one for today at said location. For example, if I have “exercise” as a task I do at 5pm every weekday when I get home and then complete today’s task at 12pm and go back to work and then come home, it notifies me for tomorrow’s task when I get home today. I attempted to have them fix it and they tried but because Apple has restrictions on 3rd party apps, they can’t fix it.

With all of the features coming next year with Apple Intelligence, I want to use at least 1 stock Apple app. So, that is Apple Reminders. I don’t see how AI can make Apple Notes better anyway.

Obsidian

Obsidian is the only app that allows me to have the privacy I crave while also having all of the features I could ever want/need. So, I am sticking with Obsidian for everything I need to keep long-term. Obsidian Kanban makes it super easy to manage my projects and I have a database for games I have or want as well as books I have or want and movies I have or want. So I can know where I have the movies/books/games and know what I think. I forget plots easily so having a place where plots are written down is useful as well.

I have also set up my daily notes to use Excalidraw as well so I can handwrite my notes and type in them as well. Defaults to opening the markdown version but I can use a quick hotkey to switch it to the excalidraw view and draw/handwrite whatever I want and that is then embedded into my note as an SVG so that I can see what is on the excalidraw “side” of the note without having to switch to that “side”. Nicole Van Der Hoeven has a fantastic video on this:

Notion

I use Notion to keep track of things I want to share for the games I play. You can visit Dude, That’s Erin’s Games and see what I mean. Other than that I have switched everything out of Notion as I do not like how it doesn’t have offline mode. Not for privacy/security but for useful reasons. For example, I was applying for jobs and I had all of my jobs in Notion as well as when interviews were and whatnot. It wasn’t synced to my Apple Calendar (cause I’m not sure if that is easily possible). Anyway, I got a call for a job interview while I was at the post office with 1 bar of service. I had to go off of memory to schedule the interview and, luckily, it didn’t collide with any other times for interviews BUT it very easily could have cause I couldn’t pull up my Notion because I had poor data service at the post office. I don’t want to rely on needing data just to see when something is. So, I am very careful to keep important things in my calendar and use Obsidian instead as well so everything is accessible while offline or in low-service areas.

Spark

I refuse to use Apple Mail because I will get notifications for emails on all of my devices and then the notifications stay if I read them on one. For example, I get an email and it notifies me on my iPad, iPhone and Mac and then I read it on my Mac and do something with it, it doesn’t sync to my iPad and iPhone until I open the app. For some reason, while Apple Notes, Reminders, etc. have background syncing (meaning they sync when you aren’t using your device) Apple Mail does not. I don’t get this decision. Maybe in iOS25 (lmao – only partially a joke) we will get that.

So, I use Spark. It automatically syncs in the background (not sure how) or at least syncs frequently and keeps itself in the foreground so I don’t have to worry about any of that. On Desktop I can copy links to notes and link them to tasks in Things 3 or Trello and those links work cross platform. Also Spark is cross platform so no matter what device I use, it will work and function similarly.

This may change next year when the Apple Mail additions get added. I plan to test Apple Mail when that comes out. For now, I am sticking with Spark.

These are my apps. I’m so happy I finally found apps I can stick with. Other than this, I’m using default apps on all of my devices but I’ll talk about what apps are on all of my devices later. Stay tuned for that.