Originally published at: TickTick Provides a Focused Daily Task List and More - TidBITS
I recently wrote about my search for a task manager in “AppBITS: Sorted Seems Moribund” (25 June 2025), outlining my desire for a task manager that would help me plan my day by combining tasks with events in a single flat view. Sorted fit the bill but had some issues and seemed to have no future. Although there were some good suggestions in the comments on that article, when the topic came up at a post-workout dinner with running friends, one said she used an app called TickTick. I hadn’t heard of it before, but my friend described it in a way that piqued my interest. After several weeks of living with TickTick, I’ve found that it provides the features I want, along with others that are extraneous but haven’t gotten in my way.
So what are those features? I want a list of daily tasks and events for the day, with the ability to mark tasks as done and clear events from the list once they have passed or I’ve acknowledged them. Importing from Reminders and Calendar is essential because Siri can reliably add tasks to Reminders but doesn’t support third-party apps on the Apple Watch or HomePod and behaves inconsistently with third-party commands on the iPhone. Uncompleted tasks should automatically carry over to the next day, and I want the ability to reschedule tasks to future dates and times if I determine they won’t be happening anytime soon. I also need an iPhone widget showing my day’s items to prevent the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. Finally, I want a Mac version of the app with synchronization so I can manage tasks across devices.
TickTick checks all these boxes. I primarily use it on the iPhone, although I keep its Mac app open on my third screen for when that’s easier to access. The most noticeable feature for me is its interactive Today widget, which I keep front and center on my iPhone’s Home Screen so I can’t ignore it. The widget is live—tapping checkboxes marks tasks as done, and tapping an item name opens it for editing in TickTick. Tapping the + icon creates a task. Usually, though, I just tap on an empty spot to open the app.
The main Today screen displays tasks and events—either created internally or imported from Reminders and Calendar—sorted by time. (When importing from Reminders, TickTick automatically deletes tasks from the primary list after import to prevent conflicts. There’s also a one-time import option to bring everything over. Note that these are one-way imports, not two-way syncs.) I set morning times for all my tasks to ensure that I’m alerted to their existence early in the day, not because that’s necessarily when I’ll complete them. On days when little is happening, I leave tasks and events in their default order, but on busier days, I may drag them into the sequence in which I want to complete them. That’s the “bula board” concept that I mentioned in the Sorted article—scheduling specific times and durations for each task feels like too much meta-management for me.
On the Today screen, tapping a checkbox marks the task as done, an action that’s easily reversed as long as you have Show Completed selected (from the ••• menu in the upper-right corner). While you can’t mark an event as done, per se, you can archive it with a swipe, thus removing it from the Today list. One limitation is that task reordering and event archiving don’t sync between the iPhone and Mac versions of TickTick, although all other changes sync correctly.
Tapping an item opens it for editing, but if you touch and hold (or Control-click on the Mac) any task, you can change its date or modify various pieces of metadata. TickTick does a particularly good job of presenting you with future date options, and you can even customize the buttons in the middle screenshot below. I also occasionally use the Add to Live Activity feature, which places the task on my Lock Screen to help me stay focused.
Of course, TickTick can post notifications of upcoming timed tasks and events (which can also flow through to the Apple Watch), and it offers a Daily Notification feature that provides an overview of the day’s tasks at a set time on chosen days of the week. Most notably, it has an option for constant reminders for those tasks that you can’t ignore. These constant reminders ping you every minute until you snooze them or mark them as done, responding to my request in “A Call to Alarms: Why We Need Persistent Calendar and Reminder Notifications” (11 May 2023). TickTick can also send email notifications (up to 50 per day), but I haven’t turned that on.
TickTick offers numerous settings that allow you to customize the tab bar at the bottom (more on those features next), the app theme and colors, notification options, date and time options like the starting day of the week and week numbers, swipe actions, task defaults, and much more.
One challenge with TickTick is the sheer number of features, many of which I don’t personally use. For example:
- Kanban and Timeline views: If a simple list isn’t sufficient, you can switch to a Kanban view that lets you separate any list into user-defined columns. There’s also a Timeline view that displays task durations, giving you lightweight project management capabilities.
- Calendar view: A complex calendar screen shows your tasks and events in a vertically scrolling month view or a horizontally scrolling list, day, three-day, or week view. Each view includes various options for filtering the range, changing the display, arranging tasks, subscribing to calendars, sharing your items as text or an image, and printing.
- Focus mode: Although it doesn’t use the system-wide Focus feature, TickTick offers its own focus timers with a Pomodoro-style countdown or a count-up stopwatch, both of which can play any of 17 varieties of white noise. Focus timers can also be Live Activities, so you see them on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island for supported iPhones. TickTick can record and track focus efforts, allowing you to see how productive you’ve been. You can even display the timer as a floating window (much like a floating video).
- Eisenhower Matrix: If you struggle to decide what to do next, you can prioritize tasks and then use the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize them. High-priority tasks are Urgent & Important, medium-priority tasks are Not Urgent & Important, low-priority tasks are Urgent & Unimportant, and tasks with no priority are Not Urgent & Unimportant.
- Habit Tracker: If you want to develop certain habits—such as drinking more water, doing physical therapy every day, writing in your journal, etc.—TickTick can help. Habit tracker entries appear in the Today view in a section below the day’s open tasks. There are many dedicated apps for this purpose as well, but if you view habits as tasks to be completed regularly, this feature might be helpful.
- Countdown: I don’t think I’ve ever paid attention to the number of days until an event since longing for summer vacation in grade school. But those who enjoy tracking how far away certain events are might like TickTick’s Countdown feature, which offers all the customization you could want.
- So many more features: The more I explore TickTick, the more features I discover that I currently have no interest in using. You can organize tasks in lists or categorize them with tags. In the desktop versions of TickTick, you can open tasks as sticky notes that can be arranged and pinned to the desktop. If hierarchy matters to you, tasks can include subtasks. TickTick supports Siri and Shortcuts, and along with Reminders and Calendar, it can import from Notion, Apple Health, Todoist, and Microsoft To Do. It offers integrations with Amazon Alexa, IFTTT, Zapier, and the Spark email client. There’s collaboration for sharing lists and assigning tasks to others. It awards badges and can track any action that is persistent, such as completing tasks. TickTick even has time zone support to work around the limitation in Reminders that prevents tasks from shifting to the correct time in a new time zone.
If you want to try TickTick, it’s free to use on multiple platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. There are extensions for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. The Chrome extension likely works with Chromium browsers like Arc, Brave, Comet, Dia, and Vivaldi. Additional add-ons for Gmail and Outlook make it easy to create tasks directly from your email.
Like many other apps, TickTick uses a freemium model. Subscribing to the $35.99-per-year Premium tier unlocks additional integration and customization options, including multiple calendar views, third-party calendar subscriptions, themes, statistics, and higher limits on lists and tasks. While I can’t recall which premium features persuaded me to subscribe, I find the core functionality valuable enough to justify the cost. For many users, the free version will be sufficient, but those with specific needs might appreciate the expanded capabilities of the Premium tier.
