Originally published at: AppBITS: Sorted Seems Moribund - TidBITS
I’m a sucker for task management apps. I always fall for their promise to help me organize the tasks I want to accomplish, with the strong suggestion that doing so will actually lead to getting them done. Over the years, I’ve tried more of these apps than I can count, but none have stuck, because they always require too much effort. When I get busy, I just sit down and do the work and forget about planning. The deadline or email in front of me today always feels more urgent than some idea I had yesterday.
Nearly all my tasks fall into two main groups. The first consists of small tasks that usually take only a few minutes. The hard part is remembering to do them, which I do with Reminders by telling Siri to “Remind me to call the car repair shop tomorrow at 9 AM.” The reminder then generates a notification that I dismiss once I’ve completed the task. (Problems arise when I can’t get to the task or delay it too long.) The second group includes larger projects that take hours to complete, sometimes over several days, such as writing articles, managing my websites, and house projects. Managing these in Reminders works poorly because they need to fit into my overall daily schedule and take too long to finish.
There’s also a third category: calendar events, which occupy fixed parts of my daily schedule. I might start the day with the best intentions of achieving a major writing goal, only to find that I have an appointment that will break up the workday.
Looking for a Task Manager
Recently, while trying to wrap my head around the best way to juggle these tasks, I tested several promising task management programs, including Agenda, NotePlan, and Structured. Agenda and NotePlan provided scheduling features, but were too focused on notes. I’m still searching for the right app to help me record information I want to revisit later, but they’re not it, and their emphasis on notes muddied the scheduling features for me.
Structured, on the other hand, was extremely interesting because it allowed me to organize even small tasks in a specific order, making it easier to work through them. The problem with Structured was that it required me to specify when I would start each task and how long it would take to complete. That’s more meta-work than I want to do, especially when some tasks might take minutes and others an unknown number of hours. I might have a task like calling the car repair shop to set up an appointment, but I don’t care when it happens during the morning, and it’s not worth setting it to take five minutes in the interface. Simultaneously, articles always seem to take longer than I expect.
Overall, these apps suffer from having too many features. I want something sufficiently lightweight that managing my daily schedule doesn’t require blocking out extra time to do so.
Using Sorted as a Bula Board
Eventually, I realized that I wanted something more like a bula board, a concept I encountered years ago during a family vacation at a resort in Fiji. The bula board was a large board that laid out the day’s activities in order, but generally without specific times. The idea was that things would happen, but you shouldn’t stress about the exact timing. (In Fijian, “bula” means “life,” “health,” “livelihood,” or “well-being”—an apt concept for a tool designed to bring calm, structure, and clarity to daily life. It’s also commonly used as a greeting—similar in function to “hello,” but literally wishing someone life or health, which is a nice way to think about starting the workday.)
I wanted a simple list of tasks that I could quickly drag into a desired order around my calendar events. After more searching, I stumbled across Sorted. It automatically pulls in events from Calendar and tasks from Reminders, marking them as done there. After importing tasks, Sorted adds them to the specified day or, if there’s no associated date, to a general Inbox. On a given day, you can drag the tasks around the fixed-time events to put them in your preferred order; there’s also a more granular scheduling system that looks quite easy but doesn’t interest me.
Unusually, Sorted allows you to mark both tasks and events as completed, with completed items either moving to the bottom of the list or being hidden entirely, based on your settings. Watching your list shrink helps you feel like you’re being productive throughout the day. Sorted also offers widgets that display the day’s task list or the Inbox, ensuring that it stays forefront in your mind throughout the day. Uncompleted tasks roll over to the next day, though I sometimes reschedule them manually to clear the widget at the end of the day.
I could tell you a lot more about Sorted, but as much as I like it, I can’t recommend it. Even though it’s free to download and use, an in-app purchase is required to access Pro features, including the option to sync between the iPhone and Mac versions. After my Pro trial ended, I was almost ready to pay $35.99 for its Pro bundle of both apps, but Sorted helpfully suggested that I could extend the trial, so I did. That’s when my problems started.
Somehow, the Mac and iPhone versions got out of sync during that time, even though both claimed they were under the extended trial, and my query to Sorted support went unanswered. After the extended trials expired, the option to purchase the Pro bundle for both versions remained unavailable. When I tried to find out why, I discovered that the company’s support site had been disabled due to a lack of payment. Further investigation revealed that the Mac app hadn’t been updated in 2 years, the iPhone and iPad versions last received updates 8 months ago, the link to the company’s public Slack workspace was broken, the last social media posts from the company’s official accounts were from 2023, and on LinkedIn, the company’s co-founder and COO lists Sorted as a job held from January 2016 through January 2024. Multiple email messages also went unanswered. In the inimitable words of Monty Python, I think Sorted is an ex-parrot.
Since I don’t trust that Sorted will sync properly even if I could buy the Pro version on both the Mac and iPhone, I’m currently using it solely on the iPhone, although with its iPhone widgets on my macOS desktop. Clicking them opens Sorted via iPhone Mirroring, which is clumsy but functional.
Still, it clearly doesn’t make sense to rely on Sorted in any meaningful way moving forward. So, here’s my question: do you know of any task management apps that work on the Mac and iPhone, integrate with Reminders and Calendar, and offer a daily combined task and event list where items can be rearranged and checked off? (The daily view in most calendar apps isn’t sufficient because it wants to indicate how much time is between a 9 AM appointment and a 6 PM dinner, which I don’t care about—I just want a straightforward list of tasks and events.) Maybe I’m unusual in this desire, but I’ll bet others would appreciate learning about such tools as well.
