This to-do list app is a must have for organizing your life

You might have tried to-do apps before and realize that they are more like to-don’ts. Cumbersome, time consuming and constantly reminding you of things you should be doing, they’re not great at actually saving you time and better organizing your life. Wunderlist is different.

Its ease of use means that you can spend just a few minutes getting up and running by setting up some lists, sharing with friends and adding notifications and alarms. Once you’ve done that you’ll already be able to see the benefits.

Work better together

Initially, Wunderlist provides you with a range of categories to help you make relevant lists, which includes groceries, travel and movies to watch. But you can use it for anything. Then you can create an unlimited number of tasks within these lists (or subtasks in the pro version) and add completion dates, alarms and notifications (push or email) if you choose. Although currently it doesn’t sync with your phone or tablet’s calendar.

The great thing about Wunderlist is it’s not just a tool for you to use, it’s designed for collaboration. You can add people to your lists via their email addresses and then assign them tasks. The Activity Center tab keeps you up to date with their progress, as well as providing a log for previous activity. The Conversations feature lets you comment on an action in a list. This could be something like “when do you think you will be able to finish that task?” or “I could do with some help”.

It also shows you completed items so you can keep a track of completed tasks, allows you to prioritize items by starring them and notifies you when there has been activity on your list (unless you chose to put a ‘do not disturb’ on it). And if you’re really proud of your list, Wunderlist lets you publish it for the whole world to see.

If you upgrade to the Pro version, you get more features, such as the ability to add files of any size to the lists, assign an unlimited amount of tasks, create subtasks if you need to go into smaller steps and choose from extra backgrounds.

Say goodbye to annoying notifications

Wunderlist is extremely easy to use: one tap to add an item and one swipe or tap to remove it. The interface is intuitive. Notifications, conversations, settings and search all use icons commonly associated with these features (check out the screenshots to see what I mean) so there’s no confusion about what you’re doing.

Some task management apps can actually make organizing your life more of a headache with their complicated controls, and persistent and annoying notifications. Not so Wunderlist. Its ease of use is what makes it stand out, you don’t need to play around to get the hang of it or discover useful and important features, it just works and that is something I don’t say as much as I would like.

Syncing is supposed to happen in real time (connection permitting), but it’s not always reliable. Sometimes notifications take a while to come through. But it does work across platforms and devices (tablet, PC and smartphone), which is a plus.

Spend less time organizing, more time doing

Wunderlist is an awesome way to organize your life. It provides the right features in an easy-to-use way that will actually make your life easier, not see you spend more time organizing than actually doing anything.

Once the syncing issues have been ironed out then Wunderlist will be my task management app of choice.