Amplenote

I came to this app straight from the most convoluted of all Notion setups. I had reminders for different subjects in (don’t judge me) 3 different apps as well. My calendar was in Google calendar, having no desktop app bugged me to no end, and I was looking for an alternative for my PKM. Amplenote has replaced all of it. I won’t lie and say there’s no learning curve, but it follows the general flow of most tried and true productivity models (BASB, GTD, etc.) especially if you tweak your tag setup a bit. I know where the info I need is. I’m pushed to make more tasks and less useless note piles. It’s using literally HALF the memory on my laptop that Notion would take, not to mention no longer needing to run a separate task list at all, and the phone widget is awesome to boot. Community plugins are well made, responses to feedback and community voting boards help prioritize new features. The developers genuinely seem to care. It takes some learning up front, but not as much as you think. Give it a try.

Before this app and the philosophy behind it I used many apps to keep organized. Meeting and class notes went into a dedicated note app. If an action item or todo came up in that meeting, I’d open the task management app to capture the task. Eventually the calendar would be open so I could capture upcoming event dates. When planning out my week I had several things to pull from to focus on what to do and when to do it. Even with learning GTD and other methods the whole process was more cumbersome than it needed to be. I gave this app a try. It took some getting used to as I merged everything under one roof. Now the transition is made I feel completely in control of the process from intake to completion. Id highly recommend this app for anyone looking for a digital brain that can keep life organized.

I wanted to give Amplenote a try because I was so impressed with the way the app triages tasks. Basically, tasks are given a numerical rating based on how long they are expected to take, when they are due, and how urgent/important they are. This is a great idea, and hopefully as Amplenote goes along and perfects its troublesome aspects, it can further refine this idea. The app doesn’t use standard markdown, and doesn’t support split screen on iPadOS. This meant that I was struggling to enter tasks from other apps. Because Amplenote doesn’t provide an in-app list of hotkeys, and because some of the hotkeys it does provide are non-functional, I found the app confusing at times. I think it has quite a few kinks to work out before it can be considered a stable, ready-for-consumer task management tool. Finally, the calendar only allows for “business” and “household” as calendar segments, and allegedly one can drag tasks to one’s day to schedule around appointments. I was never able to get this feature to work, despite trying in both the web app, iOS, and iPadOS.