As writer Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Well, your day has 24 hours. How many of those hours do you spend chasing your goals, whether work or personal?
If you find yourself struggling to answer this question, you probably need to have greater visibility into your days, at both the macro and micro levels. Daily planner apps help you do just that. Why do you need to use a daily planner app, particularly one with time slots? Well, because if you are not vigilant, the hours have a way of getting away from your hands at lightning-fast speed!
During their lifetime, an average person will spend 90,000 hours at work, according to Jessica Pryce-Jones and as quoted in Forbes. However, the Washington Post quotes the University of California researchers who discovered that an average office worker can lose up to 6 hours of a work day due to constant interruptions.
We understand that not every working hour is actually dedicated to important tasks. There is commuting, coffee breaks, lunch, and hanging out with work buddies to consider as well. While socializing and breaks are necessary, beware of getting too caught up in them. These distractions only detract you from the task at hand and as a result, your productivity suffers.
A daily planner app, as the name suggests, helps you plan out your day from beginning to end. It helps you account for your most productive hours of the day by making planning easy. These apps serve a variety of functions including time, task, and productivity management - not just for individuals but entire teams.
There are countless options available in the market. In this blog, we present only the 5 best planner apps with daily time slots to help you make an informed decision without wasting time. These apps include:
1 - Week Plan
2 - TimeCamp
3 - Any.do
4 - Day by Day Organizer
5 - Things 3
Before we get to explore the five best daily planner apps with time slots in the market, let’s give you a quick analysis of the purpose of daily planning.
What Is the Purpose of Daily Planner Apps?
Daily work planner apps help you plan your day with precision. When you start using these apps for daily planning, you can say goodbye to creating to-do lists. Instead, you can use a planning app to fill in the hourly slots of each day with your priority tasks. This helps you stay on top of your deadlines and meet goals effortlessly.
A daily planner incorporates an advanced calendar capability as well, which means it can double as a calendar app for your scheduling requirements. Some of the benefits offered by these apps include:
- Task management
- Meeting management
- Collaboration between team members
- Tracking project due dates
- Workload management
- Time management.
1. Week Plan
Week Plan is a daily planner app with time slots designed to turbocharge your productivity. It offers a monthly, weekly, and daily view of the calendar. The planner is designed in a manner that you can view the hourly slots of any given day on your calendar and fill it up with the required tasks.
It also offers you a quadrant view so that you can prioritize your daily tasks per the Eisenhower Matrix - that is, categories of: important and urgent; urgent but not important; important but not urgent; neither urgent nor important.
In addition, Week Plan also helps you create a list of HITs - High Impact Tasks. These are tasks that are important for you not just in the short but also in the long term. You can use this feature to break down a larger goal into smaller, doable chunks. With the in-built Pomodoro time tracker in Week Plan, you can also track the time you spend on each task and sub-task.
A big selling feature of Week Plan is its day summary function. Using it, you can get a gist of how you spent your day and learn how productive you and your team members were. With this knowledge available, it will become easier for you to plan the next days and delegate tasks accordingly.
2. TimeCamp
TimeCamp is an app made for team management. If you want to track the time of your team members to ascertain their productivity and distribute the workload fairly, this tool will come in handy for you. In addition, it also offers the function of budget tracking so you can measure how profitable a project is for you against the billable hours.
With solid time tracking capabilities built within TimeCamp, the app also gives you the option to record the attendance of your team members. Using this function, you can generate timesheets easily and process the payroll automatically, without much manual intervention.
3. Any.do
Any.do helps you with the organization of your work day. It makes the process of creating to-do lists for daily planning digital. Using it, you no longer have to spend hours creating paper-based menus of work tasks. You can simply use this app to create lists not just for the present day but for tomorrow and the days following it as well.
Furthermore, Any.do has strong calendar functions which allow you to track your days effectively. For each day, you can view the calendar and add your tasks. You can also specify details such as deadlines, location, team members responsible for the task, set reminders, and much more. With its great flexibility, the app works wonderfully for those who are looking for productive ways to collaborate with their teams on a day-to-day basis.
4. Day by Day Organizer
As the name suggests, Day by Day Organizer is a planning and organization app for those looking to take charge of their days. Since this is an Android app, it will not be accessible to users of Apple and other platforms. However, for Android users, this one tool can be a powerful way to manage their daily work with ease.
Day by Day Organizer integrates with both Google Calendar and Google Tasks to help you visualize and plan your days without switching from app to app. You can define your day in the app and the information will sync across various devices.
The task management function allowed by this app is helpful as it enables you to view every task on the dashboard in the form of a concise list. You can also use the voice input method to fill your calendar in the app, set birthday reminders in it, and plan not just your days but also weeks and months effortlessly.
5. Things 3
Things 3 is an app mostly geared toward individuals rather than teams. It is a daily planning tool with useful capabilities including to-do lists, task scheduling, and more. This app, available for Apple users, allows you to plan your days meticulously by adding tasks for each area of your life including family, work, finances, social life, etc. With such categorization, you can track all aspects for greater life satisfaction.
The app also integrates with external calendars. So you can easily connect it to your iPhone calendar, for instance, and view upcoming events with a single click. With this information readily available, it also becomes easier to plan your day around your schedule and avoid any conflicts. The app allows you to set reminders to help you stay aware of what’s next in your day.
FAQs
Before we end this article, we’d like to answer some of the most urgent inquiries people have about daily planning apps. We will answer any queries you may also be silently harbouring at present. The aim is to clear your confusion and gently nudge you forward on your journey of enhanced daily productivity.
1. How to choose the best planner apps?
Your choice of a planner app should depend solely on your requirements and budget. While there are many products available in the market, before investing in one, assess what you need. Is it to-do lists, time tracking, or project management?
For instance, if you need an app that can bring your entire team to a single dashboard, do not go for one that asks for extra payment every time a new team member signs up. We advise you to do your due diligence before spending on a daily planning tool.
2. What are the benefits of planner apps?
As described in the blog, planner apps offer a multitude of benefits including but not limited to time tracking, task management, team collaboration, budget tracking (to calculate your billable hours), and more. You can count on them to boost your productivity and improve your efficiency by helping you focus, remove distractions and block your calendar off to get priority tasks done within the deadline.
3. Do planner apps work?
Planning is known to improve productivity, as backed by research. So yes – planner apps work because underneath the digital functions they deploy underlies a very simple technique: stating your tasks and defining their timelines. Therefore, use a planner app without worries as they most certainly will bring clarity to your work days, streamline daily task management and empower you to achieve better results faster than before.
Conclusion
Are you willing to say goodbye to distractions? Are you ready to welcome a life of peak productivity? Yes? Well, get started!
You now know the tools you need to ease your journey of becoming a more efficient, successful, and content individual.
The project of self-fulfilment begins with holding yourself accountable for the hours of your day and then moving on to bigger milestones. Once you have got your daily planning down, we recommend you also consider other powerful planning tools such as a personal planner, life planner, and goal planner to get maximum benefits.
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