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Taskade is The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity

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Pietersen Kevin

Forget email drafts, notes apps and to-do list managers: Taskade does all that and more

Everything I need to keep my life running is stored online. Somewhere. I just can’t find it.

I’m talking about all the account numbers, meeting notes, to-do lists, contact information and column drafts I need to see every day. Plus the recipes I want to cook, wines I need to try, and YouTube videos I ought to watch. Some of that stuff lives in my email inbox, and some in Google Docs. Then there are my Pinterest boards, miscellaneous bookmarks and the Evernote account I can never organize coherently.

In theory, the internet makes it easier than ever to keep everything I need a few taps away. In reality, the internet has a way of fragmenting our lives. It’s like I wrote everything in a notebook and then got drunk, ripped out each page and hid them in different places around my house.

Taskade makes a great tool for simple to-do lists, and you can use photos, emojis and stock art to spruce them up.

Photo: David Pierce/The Wall Street Journal

Over the past few weeks, an app called Taskade has helped me turn chaos into order. Taskade combines many of the best features of Google Docs, Excel and Dropbox, along with lots of task-management and organizational tools. Taskade Labs Chief Executive Ivan Zhao describes the product as “the next generation of Microsoft Office,” which is a little hyperbolic and a lot ambitious. But it is the best life-organization tool I’ve tried.

Taskade combines the features of a note-taking app, a task-management app and a spreadsheet tool the way that Steve Jobs combined an iPod, a cellphone and a web browser into the iPhone: All these tools work together to create something more than its parts.

I should mention that Taskade is fairly expensive: It has a limited free tier and costs $8 a month for heavy use. Still, it might pay for itself in the apps it replaces, and I’ve found it easily worth the cost.

 I now have a page with all my airline and hotel loyalty numbers in a bulleted list, above a photo of my dental insurance card and an embedded map with directions to my dentist’s office. I made databases with all the movies, books, TV shows, and YouTube videos I need to get to—each cell opens to a rich document with my notes and thoughts. Taskade has all the interviews, research material and outlines for my columns. I’m getting married soon and am staring down my nuptial to-do list every day.

One of Taskade’s newest features is a database tool, which you can view as a table, a calendar and more.

Photo: David Pierce/The Wall Street Journal

I used to need five separate apps to keep all this stuff straight. Now it’s all in Taskade, a few clicks or a simple search away.

Block by Block

 It might be easier to think of Taskade is a super-simple website builder than a productivity app.

When you open a new page in the app, you’re really creating a blank grid onto which you can place and arrange just about anything. The app’s basic element is the block, which could be a paragraph of text, a bulleted list, a table, an image, a code snippet, a YouTube video, a PDF and more. You insert blocks with a tap or keyboard shortcut and then reorder and organize these to your heart’s content. You can easily change the nature of a block, too. For instance, you can select a bunch of text and turn it into a to-do list.

Taskade’s basic element is the block, which takes many forms: text, links, images, bookmarks and more.

Photo: David Pierce/The Wall Street Journal

Taskade is like chess: easy to learn, hard to master. The app itself looks fairly familiar, with a sidebar on the left and your open page on the right. It has a few aesthetic niceties, like the option to add a cover photo to the top of any page.

When you first open the app, though, it doesn’t do enough to help you understand everything it can do. Even after weeks of using Taskade daily, I’m only now figuring out the most efficient ways to do things while trying to avoid making terrible layout decisions. Do I really need a full-page photo inside my to-do list? My advice: Make heavy use of Taskade’s templates, because they help you layout pages and show what the app’s capable of.

There are native Taskade apps for Windows, Mac and iOS. Mr Zhao says an Android app should be available within weeks. The web app works beautifully on desktop and mobile, too, and it’s the exact same experience no matter which platform you’re using.

Taskade is very dependent on internet connectivity. It works offline only with pages you’ve opened recently while connected—which means all you can do is cross your fingers every time you open Taskade on a plane. On the upside, you can embed tweets and YouTube videos, even entire webpages, within a Taskade document.

Photo: David Pierce/The Wall Street Journal

Though I use Taskade to stay on top of my own work and life (and you should too), Taskade is designed for business teams. It offers collaborative editing, inline comments and useful tools for managing permissions and assigning tasks. If you use Slack, you can get alerts every time someone comments on or changes a Taskade document. It isn’t a substitute for Slack or Salesforce, but it can replace many of the tools so many companies use to store and share information.

One-stop Shop

Matt Galligan, the founder of the Picks and Shovels Co., a cryptocurrency services startup, offered a useful metaphor for Taskade. He says using the app is akin to shopping on Amazon. Before, “stores specialized,” he said, “and they did a good job.” Then Amazon came along and aggregated everything. It maybe wasn’t the best store for any single thing, but the one-stop convenience made it unbeatable.

That’s just it: Taskade isn’t as powerful a spreadsheet tool as Excel, and it doesn’t have some of the task-management features I want—when a task is due, I would like an alert, for instance. (Taskade says that’s coming.) Yet the app has helped me whittle the places I keep stuff down to just two. I can’t stop email from coming in; I can put everything else in Taskade.

Photo: David Pierce/The Wall Street Journal

There are lots left for the Taskade team to do, of course. In addition to task reminders, it’s also working on calendar sync, PowerPoint-style presentation features, a web clipper, better offline support and that Android app. It’s also planning to support services such as Zapier and If This Then That (IFTTT), which help move data between apps. But it already does more than any of its competitors.

For years, I’ve bounced around various note-taking apps and productivity tools, never quite happy. Evernote makes it easy to capture information, but I never liked the interface. Google Docs and Keep don’t offer enough features. Trello, Asana and other project-management software don’t work for note-taking.

Taskade fuses the best of each—and others—into a rare renaissance app, proficient in countless methods of creation and organization. I can’t put a price on the peace of mind that comes from an unfragmented life. Wait, yes I can: It’s eight bucks a month.

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Pietersen Kevin
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