NotePlan 2
A great day planner for the incredibly busy
A progress ring icon now shows how much of your to-do stack has been done
£28.99 FROM NotePlan, noteplan.co NEEDS macOS 10.12 or later
NotePlan combines calendar, notes, and to-do lists to create an effective day planner. It has fast, useful tagging and Markdown formatting, and there’s also the obligatory iOS companion app that syncs via iCloud.
For users of version 1, NotePlan 2 has some useful improvements. The redesigned layout shows calendar, notes and the editor at the same time instead of the switching required in version 1. The new Week View is scrollable so you can see everything, and the date tagging of To-Dos makes its way from the iOS app to the Mac. There are other useful changes, such as a progress ring icon that shows how much of your to-do stack has been done, easier event editing, and a new list view for your notes.
The main interface has a three-pane layout. The left sidebar gives you links to calendar items, notes, hashtags, and @ mentions; then the two large panels are for your calendar and to-do list respectively. The calendar can be viewed in list or traditional calendar mode, and in the to-do section you can combine calendar events and reminders with quick thoughts and notes. A single button switches between the three-pane window and a focused layout that just shows the to-do panel. If you use your Mac for work, personal and extra-curricular calendars, you can turn off the ones you don’t want to see.
Quick-fire notes
The app is based on the popular bullet journal approach, for quickly scribbling notes and to-dos and then tagging, categorising and/or assigning deadlines to them. For example, you might type “* get @louise to speak to @dave about #marketing”* to create a to-do and then click on the More icon to set a deadline and reminder. The mentions and hashtags are added to the sidebar for easy searching, so in our example we could search to see everything assigned to Louise, Dave or the Marketing department. It’s not a project management app, but it’s more than capable of tracking even complex schedules.
A good productivity app gets out of the way: the more time you spend messing about in an app, the less time you spend getting things done. NotePlan gets out of the way.