The organization has a variety of meanings. Just ask anyone what it means to be organized and you’ll have as many answers as there are people you ask.
That’s justified: there are many dimensions to being organized. We can organize our projects, our notes, our thoughts, our teams, and even our conversations.
Thankfully, we all share a common ground when it comes to the benefits of being organized: you have more energy, you feel composed and focused, and you know exactly what you should do.
And out of hundreds of organization apps there’s an app in each category that excels at facilitating these benefits.
We tried many organization apps. We tested them in a production environment. Some of them we forgot about after a week. Some we used for years.
Here are the best organization apps we recommend for everyone who’s serious about becoming and staying organized.
Best Apps For Organizing Your Team Projects
Working in a team means you will have projects and you will have lots of them. That’s why how you organize your projects and what tool you use have long-term profound consequences on your performance.
Asana
Asana’s workflow revolves around managing any project as a series of either standalone or dependent tasks. In Asana you can create different projects and then create tasks to assign to the projects. Each task can be augmented with additional information such as due date, file attachments, comments, tags, checklists, and priority.
Such flexibility allows you to create simple tasks with only due dates or complex tasks with multiple steps, dependencies, and assignees. You can also add custom fields that contain information unique to your project, for example, the estimated budget for the task or priority. As of now you can’t use math formulas or perform calculations in Asana custom fields.
One of the major benefits of Asana that can’t be overlooked is that many people are already familiar with the tool. This project management app has been around for years and if you organize your projects in Asana it gets easier to collaborate with people as they are likely already familiar with the app.
Using Asana, you have the option of viewing your objects and tasks in different ways: Calendar View, Kanban board, timeline, list, or overview dashboard. Every view is actionable: you can drag and drop tasks in the Calendar view to change their due dates. You can drag tasks across the Kanban status board and task statuses will change accordingly.
With the flexibility Asana offers, you can set up projects in many different ways and adjust your workflows on the go.
Asana offers a library of 50+ ready-to-use project templates that help you quickly organize projects in a certain structure or niche. For example, there are templates for product launches, Scrum sprints, account tracking, employee onboarding, and many more.
Here are a few prominent Asana features that will help you better organize projects:
- Ready-to-use templates to quickly set up different types of projects
- Integration with many other tools, e.g. Slack, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, Google Calendar, etc.
- Tasks dependencies, i.e. can’t complete one task before another is completed
- Variety of ways to receive notifications about task progress or deadlines
- Productivity reports
- Asana Intelligence: AI that identifies roadblocks, sets Smart Goals, offers summarization, or edits text
Possible concerns:
- Lots of moving parts – easy to forget about tasks you created if you don’t track them specifically
- Takes time to master all the features Asana offers
Trello
With its simple and intuitive design, Trello is one of the easiest organizational apps to use. In Trello, you have boards with columns and cards that can be moved from one column to another.
The most obvious Trello application is to create a board with columns “To Do”, “Doing”, and “Done” and move all your tasks across the three. Each card on the board can include descriptions, comments, attachments, labels, and even checklists.
But don’t let Trello’s simplicity fool you. You can create as many columns as you need and name them as you want. Such flexibility allows for creating complicated pipelines with multiple stages. For example, you can create a sales process and move your items through it, or outline an entire hiring pipeline board with columns that represent all the stages of a hiring process.
Additionally, you can create as many boards as you want, so organizing new projects becomes as simple as creating a new board.
You can use built-in filters and search through all your cards (tasks) using labels, assignees, or keywords.
The best part is that every Trello feature mentioned so far is free. Despite the fact that most people are happy with the free version of Trello, its premium version offers more advanced features: custom fields for cards, automation, and additional views such as Calendar view and Timeline view.
Here are some prominent Trello features that will help you better organize your projects:
- Project management templates for all kinds of projects
- Productivity metrics
- Different projects views
- Power-ups (or plugins) and automation
- Integrations with Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, and so on
Possible concerns:
- Might be too simple to track scaled projects
Toggl Plan
Toggl Plan is a simpler and slightly cheaper version of Asana with the Timeline view being the primary way of representing your projects that are called “plans”.
You can switch between board and timeline views to rearrange your tasks. There’s also a Taskbox dashboard that lets you see what tasks are assigned to you and allows you to quickly create new tasks.
As with Asana, tasks from different projects are color-coded which lets you quickly differentiate between projects or see what projects receive fewer action items.
To summarize notable Toggl Plan organization features:
- Color-coded tasks, projects, and milestones
- Intuitive team timeline view
- Task checklists
Possible concerns:
- Does not allow multiple assignments to one job or sub-jobs with separate tasks
- No task export
Best Apps For Organizing Your Tasks
Tasks are the building blocks of every project or goal. Tasks require a deeper level of granularity to be properly organized, so even slight differences in how different task organization apps function can affect how you complete your tasks.
Todoist
Todoist is one of the most popular to-do apps that excel at organizing checklists and to-do lists quickly. The interface is simple and allows for quickly creating and rearranging your tasks. Tasks are grouped in projects with every project being essentially a list of tasks.
Such a simple approach to organization lets you create several task lists, work-related or personal ones, and easily switch between them. Todoist also is great at task nesting, as every task can become a subtask of another task simply by dragging it underneath. You can create as many subtasks levels as you need and collapse subtasks for neat organization.
To analyze how effective your task organization efforts are, Todoist automatically generates productivity reports that show how many tasks you completed over a selected period.
Another benefit from an organizational standpoint is the ability to create recurring tasks. Todoist recognizes natural language input, so writing “Every Tue” in the task title will automatically make the task reappear every Tuesday.
Tasks and projects can be color-coded, a nice visual cue to further organize tasks by projects, status, or priority. Todoist also supports board views if you’re used to working with boards in Trello or Asana.
Here’s a summary of prominent Todoist features to help you with organization:
- Task nesting
- Productivity reports
- Color-coding and tags
- Recurring tasks
- Cross-platform availability
Any.do
The downside of many task managers is how they deal with delayed and overdue tasks. Sometimes we have to deal with tens of tasks that we were supposed to do a week or even a month ago. These outdated tasks pile up our lists and make us demotivated. Any.do solves that problem with Any.do moment.
At a selected time (morning by default) Any.do offers to go through your list of tasks for the day and confirm their current status. Each task can be marked as completed, postponed, or deleted. This brief moment lets you always keep your daily tasks organized as you won’t ever have tasks that you are not planning to deal with.
Other than that, Any.do is a neat intuitive task manager with a thought-out user experience.
Just like Todoist ut supports reminders, tags, statuses, and custom notifications. An interesting feature that Any.do moment offers are location-based reminders that are triggered when you’re at a specific place.
Any.do is structured around Getting Things Done (GTD) framework and offers features for quick capturing and later organization of tasks.
Here’s a summary of prominent Any.do features for better task organization:
- Any.do moment
- Location-based reminders
- Tags and task groups
- Cross-platform availability
Dynalist
Dynalist is a mix of a list task manager with a note-taking app. If your workflow is a bit overwhelming, or you simply like capturing lots of ideas at once and then organizing them into tasks, Dynalist would be a good fit for you.
For starters, you can throw in ideas and tasks on a list. Every line on that list can then be turned into a todo-item, dragged around, or left as it is. The beauty of Dynalist comes through its simplicity, and then it’s your job to throw in the notes and then reorganize them.
To prioritize your tasks you can either drag them around and put the highest priority tasks higher up, or use bold text, emojis, and highlights. Dynalist supports markdown text formatting, so everything, including the way you want your text to be formatted, can be typed in. For example, type “==” around a certain word or task and you’ll have it highlighted.
Dynalist supports #tags, so all tasks with a certain tag can be easily found through a built-in search.
Prominent Dynalist features are:
- Markdown formatting
- GTD inbox
- Recurring tasks
- Google Calendar sync
- Adding notes to items on the list
- Headings and task nesting
Best Apps For Organizing Your Meetings
If you want to see how organized your team is, look at their meetings. If your meetings are all over the place and take too much time from your team, that’s a bad sign.
Luckily, there are apps that help you dramatically reduce time wasted in meetings every week while keeping their value and even increasing it.
Geekbot
If your team struggles with having too many meetings or if your meetings are too long and unproductive, Geekbot can be the ultimate solution to your problem.
Geekbot replaces long and distracting real-time meetings with short and distract-free asynchronous meetings directly in Slack or MS Teams.
Here’s how it works. Suppose you want to run a daily standup.
At the selected time, Geekbot will send three standup questions via Slack direct message to members of a team.
Your team members don’t have to answer the questions immediately and can answer whenever they have a free minute throughout the day.
As a result, instead of listening to other people reporting on their work during a real-time meeting, every team member only spends a minute answering their questions.
After that, Geekbot gathers all the responses in a shared Slack or MS Teams channel. Here team members and managers can glance over all responses from all team members and focus only on those that interest them. Developers, for example, won’t have to listen to reports from marketers on work they have nothing to do with, and vice versa.
At the same time, colleagues can easily follow up on each other using Slack/Teams threads or browse through past reports to find useful historic data.
Compare that to real-time meetings where everyone struggles to remember what was said 10 minutes ago, let alone a week or month earlier.
The benefits of asynchronous meetings with Geekbot are:
- No distractions. You can participate in Geekbot’s asynchronous meetings whenever you have free time, without being forced to break your flow or waste your most productive hours.
- Saves hours on inefficient meetings. Using Geekbot takes a minute per day as opposed to real-time calls that sometimes take hours.
- Can help improve any kind of meeting. Struggling with status reports, daily check-ins, retrospectives? Geekbot can be customized to help with any type of meeting.
- Can be used for surveys and team building. Geekbot has templates for anonymous surveys, team bonding questionnaires, and ice breaker questions. It saves money your team would otherwise spend on a standalone tool with the same functionality.
- Free for small teams. Geekbot is totally free for teams of up to 10 people and offers a free 30-day trial for larger teams.
Calendly
Calendly is a meeting organizer in a nutshell. It lets you connect events from up to six different calendars to check your availability for the day or share it with someone that you want to meet.
Other prominent features include meeting polls, automated follow-ups, and routing forms. With meeting polls, you can send polls to potential invitees to check their availability out of several pre-selected options.
Automated follow-ups help you maximize meeting attendance with SMS and email reminders. Routing forms help you establish several meeting scenarios for different visitors. For example, you can schedule different meetings based on information that your website visitors provide or connect them with different employees on your team.
Calendly can be embedded in your website, and can be available as a browser extension or mobile apps for iOS and Android. Calednly also integrates with 70 different platforms, including CRM systems and payment processors.
Prominent Calendly features:
- Lets you track all meetings and events from one place
- Available as a mobile app and browser extension
- Integrates with all popular calendar managers
- Automated meeting reminders and follow-ups
Google Calendar
The beauty of Google Calendar is that it’s omnipresent. Google’s standard calendar app integrates with every other organization app on the market simply because it’s one of the most used calendar apps in the world and a go-to choice for anyone who uses other Google products such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Notes, GSuite, and whatnot.
Of well-known features of Google Calendar are the ability to quickly schedule meetings, invite and share meetings with others, and run meetings directly in Google Meet without having to install additional software.
Of the less-known features of Google Calendar are the option to display secondary time zones, add-ons for integrating Google Calendar with 3rd party apps, the ability to include public holidays into your calendar, and location-specific meetings.
Prominent Google Calendar features to help you stay organized:
- Integrates with almost every popular tool on the Internet
- Supports location-specific and recurring events
- Ability to schedule meetings directly in Google Meet
Best Apps For Organizing Your Notes
There’s so much valuable information around, so trying to capture it is a natural step for anyone who wants to learn more or research for whatever project they have at hand. But a few weeks later we feel overwhelmed when trying to make sense of everything we gathered.
The following apps will help you better organize your personal and work-related notes.
Evernote
Evernote is one of the most popular note-taking apps that is designed to help you capture your ideas or notes whenever and wherever.
You can write down notes in the mobile app, clip images and text from a webpage using the browser extension, or simply use its desktop or web applications. Your notes will be synchronized between all the devices you are using, although the free Evernote version limits the number of synchronized devices to two.
There are several ways to organize notes in Evernote. For starters, you can group notes into notebooks and move notes between notebooks by using the menu or by dragging them. You can also create tags and assign them to your notes to organize notes by tags.
The Premium version of Evernote supports tasks and an all-in-one tasks view, although the functionality is rather basic compared to dedicated task managers. Evernote lets you attach files and images to your notes, and create doodles and sketches.
Evernote features a powerful word editor so your notes can be as complex as an elaborate blog post or even a web page prototype.
Among the notable Evernote features for a better organization:
- Supports a variety of devices and platforms
- Home dashboard customization
- Tasks and captured to-do lists inside notes
- PDF markup
Pocket is a great organization app if you browse the internet a lot and have too many bookmarks with articles you want to read later. It lets you save articles, web pages, videos, and links to your personal library.
You can add web pages and articles to Pocket using either browser extension or mobile app.
All the pages are collected into one main list, so to organize your saved pages use tags. A great feature of the app is the ability to annotate text within the articles you read. All the highlights from all the articles can later be viewed via a separate menu.
Pocket also automatically separates videos you save from articles. The app also has a curated feed of articles and a discovery queue to help you find new interesting reads.
Airtable
Airtable is a great organization app if you like working with spreadsheets but feel like Google Spreadsheets or Excel are disjointed or lack flexibility.
For example, Airtable supports views that let you see the same database from different angles. You can turn your spreadsheets into Kanban boards, Gallery, Team Calendar, and many more. That feature alone makes Airtable a mix between a database organized and a project management tool.
With Airtable’s Custom Interfaces, you can create custom dashboards and organize information in ways that work the most for you. You can even combine data from different databases and different types of data within the same screen.
Airtable also supports automations that can trigger notifications, formulas, or even custom code based on certain behavior, e.g. changing information in a single cell of your table or changing cell status.
Prominent Airtble features:
- Library of templates to quickly set up databases or projects of different types
- Built-in task tracking
- Automation
- Integrations with popular tools or custom API solutions
- Can pull and consolidate data from third-party tools such as CRMs, Google Calendar, or Jira directly into Airtable
Organize Your Thoughts
Organizing your thoughts is as hard as it gets and there are many different ways to do that. If anything, the way your organize your thoughts has a direct link to how you think. We all think differently, hence why this category of apps is so diverse.
Obsidian
Obsidian is an app that uses bi-directional links to help you organize your thoughts without actively organizing them. You don’t have to create directories, folders, or rearrange your notes in any particular order.
For starters, you don’t need to explicitly group your thoughts. Whenever one note mentions another note, even without linking to it, Obsidian shows you all unlinked mentions in the right panel. You can also see all notes that link to the current note or share the same tags.
To create a tag, simply put the # symbol before a word in the note and the tag will be automatically recognized. Obsidian also automatically builds a visual graph that shows how all of your notes are connected.
Even though Obsidian is not an app for the organization in the traditional sense, it excels at bringing connections between various notes and thoughts, which is a form of organization in itself.
Various notes can, however, be grouped into folders, and folders, in turn, can be organized as databases. Another useful feature is daily notes that are automatically titled as the current day and let you capture ideas throughout the day that will automatically be linked to your other notes through tags and mentions.
Whimsical
Whimsical is a great app for organizing your thoughts because it unites the four most common mediums: Documents, Boards, Wireframes, and Projects to represent your ideas in different ways.
Boards can be turned into a combination of imagery, mind maps, and flows to illustrate an idea or process of any complexity.
Documents can contain text-rich information combined with images and photos.
Wireframes are great for building quick prototypes and contain present and templates to quickly map out mobile apps, web interfaces, or anything in between.
Projects, lastly, allow for creating project boards (e.g. Kanban-style) and stringing together different types of project-related information.
All four types can be interconnected and interlinked. For example, you can link to text documents from your mind maps or combine several mind maps with a prototype of your app.
Your documents and mind maps can be organized further into folders and subfolders. You can use a library of templates to speed up your organization’s efforts and adapt pre-made boards to your needs. For example, there are templates available for cost-benefit analysis, Gantt charts, Team wiki, funnel diagrams, and many more.
Organize Everything At Once
The idea of organizing everything at once sounds utopian, but there are apps that can help you do it. Some have a steeper curve, but the pay-off is that you can organize all areas of your life in one place.
Notion
Notion is a wonderful example of a “you get what you make of it” app.
At first, Notion may look like a simple note-taking app, but after learning about dashboards, database connections, links, and formatting, you understand that Notion can be used to organize a project of any complexity.
A perfect example of level of an organization that can be achieved through Notion comes from August Bradley and his PPV system that can be used to organize every aspect of your life:
Let’s explore an example of having a database of books in Notion. Suppose you set up a media database where you can track all the books you read, track their current status (e.g. Reading now” or “Finished reading”), author, and add a field that contains a link to a page with notes on that book. You can add as many custom fields for the database as you want, e.g. Book Ratings, Book Cost, or Release Date.
You can interlink different pages in Notion or create dashboards that accumulate views and data from different pages. For example, you can combine data from your Book database, Podcast database, and Music database to have a complete overview of your media sources.
Notion supports tasks, advanced text formatting, custom formulas, automation, and relational databases. Each database can be viewed as a spreadsheet, board, gallery, or calendar view.
Powerful Notion filters allow you to quickly find items in your database based on different rules, tags, labels, or keywords. You can, for example, find all the 5-star books that you read after last summer, or check out the podcast episodes you started but haven’t finished yet.
Notion can be used to organize media vaults, projects, team wikis, personal notes, or anything else. It comes with a library of templates to kickstart your organization efforts or find templates that will work best with your goals.
ClickUp
ClickUp follows the same “lego-like” mentality as Notion, but there’s a key difference: leaning towards task management more than notes management.
You can achieve an exceptional level of task and data organization in both apps, it’s just that ClickUp from the get-go was forged as a project management tool, while Notion was more fit for data organization.
In ClickUp you can organize your projects as spaces that contain tasks. All your projects can be viewed in many different ways, e.g. Board View, Calendar, List, and 20+ other real-time representations.
The flexibility of such a workflow allows you to switch quickly between different perspectives. Tasks and subtasks can be created as lists and organized by due dates based using a calendar or timeline view, for example.
You can also add custom fields to your tasks to store operational data or labels and tags for later grouping and filtering.
ClickUp supports automation as well. When-Then triggers can be set up to, for example, set a new due date based on a task status change or create a new task after the last one has been completed.
Tasks can be divided into subtasks and you can track the time you spend on each task using a built-in time-tracker or ClickUp browser extension.
Google Drive
As with Google Calendar, Google Drive’s main benefit is how well it is integrated with everything on the web. Team messengers, project management tools, and productivity apps all seamlessly integrate with Google Drive, letting you access your files whenever you need them.
Another advantage of Google Drive is how well it is integrated with other Google Apps, mainly Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets. That, in turn, allows for organizing your projects as spreadsheets and documents that are then categorized in relevant Google Drive folders.
Lastly, Google Drive features a pretty advanced search that lets you browse through hundreds of documents and spreadsheets when you search for data with keywords.
LastPass
You probably have dozens if not hundreds of passwords from different tools and apps you use, so the problem of organizing them for the purposes of safety and access becomes even more crucial.
Tools like LastPass or 1Pass, or KeyPass help you bring all the passwords form different apps and websites into one place and ensure you access them quickly and safely.
Worth mentioning that LastPass and similar tools have Chtrome Extensions that help you fill in pass information quickly whenever you enter a certain website, an alternative to storing all your passwords directly in Google Chrome.
Frequently asked questions
What App Can I Use to Organize My Life?
To organize your life, use apps that can tackle organization at several levels, from organizing complex long-term projects to managing every day tasks and notes. Examples of such apps are: ClickUp, Notion, Asana.
How Do You Get Organized?
To get organized, outline as many aspects of your life as possible, from personal development and career to hobbies and relationships. Identify your current progress in every aspect of your life and write down what you’d like to achieve in 1 year, 5 years, and 10 years. Use a combination of organization apps and methodologies such as Getting Things Done, or GTD.
How Can I Organize Everything Online?
To organize everything online, use apps that can be achieved through various devices such as web browsers, desktop apps, mobile apps, and browser extensions. Examples of such apps are ClickUp, Notion, Asana, and Any.do.