Plan your day in plain English

Most apps turn a thought into a form. Title here. Date picker there. Time. Duration. Category. Priority. Save.

Seven fields to record something you could have said out loud in four seconds. So you skip the fields, type “call mum”, and three weeks later you have a list of forty things with no times on them and no idea what any of it costs.

The quickest capture is the one that does not make you translate a thought into a form.

Say it, and the fields fill themselves

“Call mum tomorrow 6pm for 20 mins”

That lands on tomorrow, at six, with twenty minutes set aside, and the end time worked out. The title is “Call mum”.

Some others that work:

• “DS Classroom 10 am to 1 pm” — read as a three-hour block.
• “Pay rent 27 Sept” — a date with no time is due by the end of that day.
• “Gym Friday 7pm for 45 mins” — weekday names work, and mean the next one.
• “Stretch day after tomorrow 7am” — including the longer phrases, not just “tomorrow”.
• “yesterday I read for 30 mins” — a day behind you is a thing you did, so it is logged as done.

You see what it understood first

Everything it took out of the sentence appears as a chip before anything saves. Tomorrow. 6:00 PM. 20 minutes. If one of them is wrong, wave it away and those words go back into the title.

Nothing is assumed quietly. That matters more than the parsing being clever, because a guess you can see is a guess you can correct.

Two shortcuts worth knowing

• Category by name. Start with Category Learning - and the rest is the task, filed under Learning.
• Twenty at once. Press Several and paste a list. One task per line, each read on its own, so they can land on different days at different times.

And if your hands are busy

Tap the microphone and say it instead. The words appear as you speak, so you can fix them before saving. Chrome, Edge and Safari can do this. Firefox cannot, so the button does not appear there.