Daily Planner & Goals: Griply

I’ve been looking for a comprehensive goal tracking and management solution for a while. I participated in a beta trial and feedback period for one app, and they just kept missing the mark (and then they abandoned it). I then built my own solution shortly before finding Griply, but even my solution for my own vision didn’t come close to being what Griply is, and I abandoned it. The dev team behind Griply has really thought of everything, and they’re incredibly responsive to customer feedback and requests. The mind behind Griply is open to feature requests, but she has a clear vision for what a goal management app should be and what it should not be, and she’s very discerning about which requests belong and which requests are just feature bloat. I absolutely love that! Simple habit trackers and heatmaps are pretty and fun, but if you want to really set goals and work towards them, Griply is the only environment I’ve found that truly supports that. Goals have a component hierarchy in Griply, and subgoals also get their own hierarchy. Habits and tasks all tie back to goals/subgoals and their completion feeds goal progress. And then there’s the analytics and different views to capture your plans and progress at a glance! Seriously, it’s an incredible app and the only one I’ve found that supports true longterm planning.

I’m giving this five stars for how quickly this team has ramped this app up to being competitive but even more so for a very original take on task management. The industry will have to follow them in terms of integrating real life goals into how you plan. For me, that’s suddenly that’s glaringly missing everywhere else. Why are we managing tasks we haven’t connected to where we’re going? (What could possibly go wrong? 😂) What’s missing in Griply is just some stuff that’s more common but still needed (and coming). Day to day, I miss Natural Language Processing [edit: already added!] and global shortcuts [edit: also added since this was written] to make adding new tasks frictionless. Down the road, I hope they’ll also work on how to manage larger backlogs of tasks where things don’t look unwieldy — something that’s hard for all of them. Maybe some clever strategies to conceal what can wait? An iPad app will be great, too. Regardless, this is a clean, clear, original take on task management that brings in both goals and habits, and even connects them all together. How they’ve done that and made it all feel simple I’ll never know. THAT is a five-star contribution. Watch out, big players! They’re just getting started.

In short, I recommend using the app as extensively as possible during the trial, to ensure it’s worth the subscription. The developer advised that it’s currently in the works, but as it stands, the app does not provide cumulative progress for goals, and only reflects the most recent progress entry. For this app to essentially require a premium subscription to be useful, it’s insane that you need to do the math to determine your overall progress. Furthermore, it’s deceptive that the screenshots reflect cumulative progress. In response to this, the developer said that “I understand how this might be confusing, and we hope to fix it very soon. Personally, I always enter a new total when adding progress to a goal (that’s also what we did in the screenshots), but I agree it’s not ideal.” No, it’s not confusing, it’s deceptive. It’s more likely for users to assume that if cumulative progress is being shown, that it is automatically calculated, and less likely for them to assume it’s manually calculated. And “enter a new total when adding progress” is just doing the math up front (you have to add your progress to your previous total to determine the new total). I have never added a new total when using a goal tracking app; I enter my current progress, and the cumulative progress is automatically calculated. I never would have subscribed if I would have known that my cumulative progress wasn’t going to be displayed. Such a fundamental feature should not be missing, and at a minimum they should have been transparent about that functionality not being available. I genuinely liked the app at first, but all the extra bells and whistles are irrelevant if the app can’t cover the basics.