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As promised in my first impressions of Routine, I am updating you on it one month on.

I’ll keep it simple. I still love it. The ease of input, the UI, the logical organisation of content and pages… I’m sticking with it.

What is Routine

It’s a task and calendar app that allows you to schedule your life and your tasks and take notes all in one. It has reminders, imports your contacts, a natural language global capture shortcut on desktop, a mobile app and very good syncing.

Pros

Easy input = low friction

The natural language input is so clever and it’s a great way of reducing input friction which is important to me. I can access Routine through the global shortcut, or on mobile. You do need to be online to use it, but I spent the vast majority of my time connected to internet, so I don’t worry about this much.

The inbox

It allows me to use this as a capture tool if needed (so perhaps my super simple capture routine has been scuppered by this beautiful app, but so far it’s worth it)

If I then need to schedule the task or event out of the inbox, that’s super easy to do, and I know it’ll show up on my daily view and on my phone homescreen via the widget too.

The mobile app

It’s just had an update and the onboarding was possibly the best example of mobile onboarding I’ve personally used. So sleek, it makes me want to use it and I’ve kept the widgets on my homescreen meaning I can capture in one click.

Drag and drop scheduling

This isn’t specific to Routine, but it’s just very intuitive to be able to see all tasks I’ve assigned to a week and the actual week I have to do these tasks in. I can drag and drop these tasks into an order that makes sense, I can move around if needed too. Then this is translated into the daily view you open the app to. It just makes sense.

Keyboard shortcuts

Every keyboard shortcut I have tried to make navigation easier and frictionless has worked, meaning there are similarities with other apps. I really value this because the learning curve is reduced and I can focus on getting things done.

Cons

I wish it had tags and an all tasks view

Tags would allow me to explore it as a project management tool. I could tag any task with the relevant project, and ideally store my notes on the project in a page that is the same entity as the tag (like in Obsidian or Logseq).

Having tasks, subtasks, notes, events and reminders would give me a solid ground on which to try managing projects.

I also wish it had a month view

I could definitely just use Google calendar for that but sometimes I want to zoom out a little bit from the week I’m in whilst planning, so switching apps interrupts my flow.

None of these two things being missing from the current offer is enough to make me try another app.

One thing Routine has made me realise

I’m shocked how my value I’m placing on aesthetics for someone who is not creative and does not have a real eye for design… I guess the simple reason for it is I need to want to interact with my calendar and task app or I will go back to the chaos of not having a task manager or reviewing my calendar… if beautiful design is the way to do it then so be it!

Summary

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed using Routine and will continue. I will also give the professional subscription a try when it is released and report back, as it looks like there are some exciting features coming!

If you want to try Routine*, I have some invites so send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll add an invite for you :)