I Need to Organise My Day
You need to organise your day. Before recommending any tool: the most common reason people can't organise their day isn't a lack of the right app — it's having too many things to do. A better system doesn't reduce your workload. But it does help you decide what matters and reduce the cognitive overhead of tracking everything.
Todoist — the task manager most people should start with
Todoist is the task manager we'd recommend to someone who asks "what should I use?" and doesn't have other context. It's clean, it works on every platform, natural language input ("meeting with Sarah tomorrow at 3pm") creates tasks correctly, and the free tier is genuinely enough for personal use. The key feature isn't any specific function — it's that it's quick enough that you actually use it. A task manager you open reluctantly is worse than a paper notebook you use consistently.
The paid tier (around £4/month) adds labels, filters, and reminders, which are worth having if you have more than about 30 active tasks at any given time. The free tier handles casual-to-moderate use fine.
Notion — if you want tasks alongside notes and projects
Notion works well for people whose tasks and notes are tightly connected — where a task often needs context, background, or a linked document. If you maintain project notes, meeting records, and a task list that all reference each other, keeping them in the same tool reduces context-switching. Notion's database feature lets you build a personal dashboard that shows tasks, deadlines, and project status in one view.
The trade-off: Notion is slower to open and add a quick task to than Todoist. If you'll be adding tasks frequently throughout the day on mobile, Notion adds friction. If your task management is more structured — weekly reviews, project planning — it's worth considering. Full review: Notion for Beginners.
Time blocking in your calendar — underrated and free
Most people use their calendar to track commitments other people make on their time. Using it to also block your own focused work time — treating "write quarterly review" as a calendar appointment rather than a task — changes how the day fills up. Google Calendar and Apple Calendar are both free. The system requires nothing new: you just put your tasks on the calendar alongside your meetings, rather than keeping them in a separate list you may or may not look at.
This is the approach we actually use for deep work days. It doesn't need a new tool. It needs the habit of treating your attention as something worth scheduling.
Reclaim.ai — for automatic time blocking
Reclaim takes your task list and automatically schedules focused work blocks in your Google Calendar around your existing meetings. You add tasks with estimated durations and deadlines, and Reclaim finds the time and books it. When meetings move, it reschedules your work blocks automatically. It's not perfect — the automatic scheduling occasionally puts things in suboptimal slots — but the core feature saves the manual work of figuring out when things will fit. Free tier handles basic scheduling. Paid plans add habits tracking and more flexibility.