TickTick Productivity App Review | Mielygraphy
Productivity, time management, project management, building habits, to-do lists, morning routines (for some)… These are usually the ideal things we want to do or achieve in our daily lives and in our work (well, aside from success). But then it’s just really hard to maintain because of a lack of knowledge or awareness of what we do.
If you are working from home like me, I’m sure you also notice that when we’re at home, we tend to procrastinate more or we get easily distracted by so many things. So we lose track of what’s important and what is not. It’s true that this happens to many people who work from home because we have less supervision when working. We have access to our phones and other gadgets that are the primary source of distraction.
So I tried to look for ways that could help me be aware of what I do, what I am supposed to be doing, and what I have done. In this post, I’m going to share an app that I feel like very underrated yet very powerful. To start off, it’s free but has a premium version that is way cheaper than the other apps. It’s loaded with all the great tools you need to do more.
As you could see on the title, it is TickTick — a task management/productivity app. I’ll try to keep it short but just keep in mind that I usually write looooong posts. HAHA!
List of Features
It has all the basic functions of a productivity app like Todoist, Any.Do and things like that. You can create tasks, add due dates, create reminders, set priorities. It has notifications too, I just feel like it’s worth mentioning because as I remember when I was using Todoist as a free user, you don’t get any notifications. Anyway, let’s dive deeper into its other functions.
Highly Customizable (SUPER)
If you go to their settings page you’ll see so many options to customize like the following:
Task default settings
Here you can change the defaults: reminder, due date, and priority when creating a new task. Meaning if you always set the due date of new tasks for tomorrow, you can set it as the default due date instead of putting it 1 by 1 on your new tasks. I use it a lot because I plan my to-do list a day before and it’s very useful.
Full control on Notifications
I feel like the developers of this app really tried to address many issues that users may have encountered with its competitors. Notifications can always be neglected and sometimes I tend to dismiss the notifications to procrastinate more.
But with the help of the notification options on TickTick, I can make notifications and reminders finally break up with my laziness. Imagine an app that lets you make notifications to be annoying so you would attend to it.
You can see it all on the settings.
Enable or Disable Smart Date/Tags Recognition
Smart date recognition(it’s when you put dates and the app recognizes it as the due date) can always be helpful but for some people, they don’t like it. With this app, you can enable or disable it and at the same time, you have an option whether to keep the dates or tags on the title of the task or not.
Set up your daily alerts
It’s also nice to have this feature where you can set specific times and days when to receive daily alerts. Daily alerts can help you prepare for the day as they will tell you what you’ve missed and what your upcoming tasks are.
Change your task due date views
This option will allow you to change the due date view to whether to show the due date itself or see the countdown on how many days or hours are left for you to complete your tasks. I personally use countdown as I rarely check the calendar hehe.
List or Kanban View
If you use different apps for your Kanban board and Lists, this one is perfect for you as you can change a specific view to List style or Kanban. When I create blog posts, I use Kanban to track and have visibility of how my blog ideas go to their respective processes or statuses from drafting to publishing.
Import and Integration with TickTick App
If you wanted to transfer your lists or task from other apps like Todoist, OmniFocus, Toodle, and others, the TickTick app allows you to import your backups from those apps easily using the Web app. On my phone, it only shows Todoist and on the PC app, it doesn’t have that option. But still, it’s accessible on the Web app so it’s fine.
You can also add some integration with your Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, IFTT, and Zapier. If you’re using a Xiaomi phone and use their control center(MIUI 12 above) it also has a shortcut button to add a new task, not sure if other devices have it since I only have Xiaomi at the moment.
Currently, I’m using the Spark email integration on Mac to remind me of some of the emails I receive.
Bit by bit this app is providing more integrations. Right now there are only a few and you can check it at https://ticktick.com/integrations.
Email and Calendar
You can subscribe to your calendars from Google, iCal, or any calendar that has a subscriber link to your TickTick app so you can see your events or other reminders directly on the app. TickTick also has a subscriber link that you can also add to your calendar app to show your task there.
If you go to the web app of TickTick, you can also see your unique email address to send tasks from any email address.
Otherwise, you can send it to todo@mail.ticktick.com using your registered email to add the email to your inbox task lists.
Custom Smart List
This feature is currently available on Premium users (their premium plan is really affordable than the others). By default, just like most productivity apps like this, you’ll have smart lists for tasks due today and for the week. With those default lists, it will show you all tasks from all lists for that specific criteria (Today and for the week).
With the custom smart list, you can set your own criteria to filter tasks that matter to you the most. To me, I always wanted to be on top of my bills payments, so I created a custom smart list that would tell me all my payables 14 days before their due.
You can even create logical criteria to filter out more tasks that you need.
Habit Tracking
Yes! If you want to build some habits and just don’t want any extra apps for extra charges, TickTick provided this feature as well. For free, you can add up to 5 and for premium, you can add as many as you want.
Just like any other habit tracking apps, it has stats to help you track better and to motivate you as well. You can also customize it which is really cool. For example, you wanted to complete 2 chapters a day. You can have an option to track the habit per chapter. If you want to drink 8 glasses of water a day, you can change the tracking method too.
Pomodoro and Stop Watch
Once again thank you to TickTick for making it almost an all-in-one tool for productivity!
Adding the Pomodoro timer and stopwatch is just great. It finally lessened the need for another app once again! The significant part is that it’s included in the free version.
You can start focusing on your tasks by enabling them.
For PC and Mac, you just need to set the Focus feature to enable it.
Templates for tasks & notes
First of all, I’d like to tell you that they have a note-taking feature as well. It may not be as intuitive as other note-taking apps like Evernote, Notion, and others. But for those who are quite new to digital note-taking, this feature is a good way to start.
Another plus is that it supports Markdown. It’s my favorite writing markup language, especially when drafting my posts like this one.
Anyway, TickTick has support for creating templates for tasks and notes.
I use them to set up my tasks for blogging easily. Below is a sample of my template, I’ll also make somehow to’s related to this in my future posts so make sure you subscribe.
https://mielygraphy.com/blog/reviews/apps/using-templates-are-now-made-easier-on-evernote/
Summary of your tasks for reporting
This feature is not very common to any other productivity apps and you may still don’t find any use case for it but I’ll share one.
A summary is like a file that logs all your activity like completing tasks. You have an option to tweak the filter for that.
This summary feature is nice for those who are digitally journalling because they can just copy and paste their logs into their digital journal. I usually do that with DayOne.
It can be useful as well for those who are working with a client. In case they asked for what you’ve done, then you can have that record on file and that you can send to them.
https://mielygraphy.com/blog/reviews/workflow-app-just-stopped-me-from-ditching-my-dayone-app/
Statistics
It’s quite the same as the summary, but this one is more of a graphical representation of what you’ve done. I rarely check it but I find it amusing to see that I’ve done so much in a week.
For some people who get motivated with metrics then this feature is right for you. For free users the reports are basic but you can also have much more detailed reporting for premium.
If you’ve gotten to this part so far, register on this link and tweet this post or share the post on Facebook. Just tag me and I’ll send you a free one-month of premium. I have 30 promotional codes to giveaway, to those who need them. And the code can only be used on an account once.
Last on my favorite is managing connected devices remotely
I think this is worth mentioning. In case you lost your device you can still remotely remove your data on that device.
Let’s wrap it up for now
To me, the TickTick app is the best productivity tool for task management. I’m glad that I found it because it ticked all my needs for managing my tasks and it really helped me motivate myself in doing more.
I’m glad that I can share it with you and I hope that this can help you as well in being more productive.
If there’s one thing they could improve, I think it is the consistency of their apps on different platforms. Because they tend to have little differences depending on the platform.
I’ll try to make some more posts about it and tutorials. Please show your support or interest in this topic by sharing your thoughts in the comments and hope you can share them too.
I really asked to promote this app because I really love it. You can use my link to help our blog.
https://ticktick.com/r?c=d503t4id
For those who’d like to try the premium for this app, I have limited vouchers to share. Just share and tag me on a public post on Facebook or Twitter and I’ll reach out. Claiming of vouchers is only allowed once per account so please don’t abuse the usage :)
