CREATING A BETTER PROFESSIONAL WORKFLOW: PART 1 — FANTASTICAL

My inbox, and by extension my mind, is a torrent of tasks, requests, and reminders. The fog of busy is blinding. Occasionally a moment of clarity emerges, and I am able to write categories of tasks and to-do lists on what seems to be an endless stream of sticky notes. Some of those tasks get completed, some get pushed off, and others get doomed to oblivion as a detached and crumpled note at the bottom of my bag. Unfortunately, the awkward “I must have missed your email” or “sorry, I completely forgot” conversation has happened more than once. I need a better way to manage emails, dates, tasks, and reminders.

I am taking a journey into better productivity through the following six cross-platform applications: Airmail, Fantastical, Evernote, OmniFocus, Workflow, and IFTTT. Over the next several months, I will be purchasing, learning, integrating, and streamlining my workflow and will be documenting this journey.

There may be other applications that emerge as crucial components, but after a little research, these six applications will serve as essential productivity and workflow boosters.

So to start off, I am tackling my calendar system.

Like many, I either have little written in my Apple Calendar app and have work-related calendars through Google Calendar. The “let me check my calendar” statement doesn’t really work for me because even though I am busy, I have nothing written in my calendar. That needs to end.

Fantastical is an interconnected system that syncs with other applications like Apple, Google, and Microsoft calendars. The app not only reads the events and displays them together in one intuitive platform, but backward publishes new events from Fantastical to designated calendars. Adding an event is simple and intuitive in the Mac OS software. The software also provides the option of creating tasks directly in the Calendar that can be checked off. Unfortunately, these events are synced to other calendars, but not automatically to a task manager. This will take another step to be addressed through IFTTT, which I will explore in future postings.

Adding calendar events is simple and intuitive in the iPhone iOS, with an intelligent population of event data, times, and GPS from a simple typed line of text.

While numerous other features make this software powerful, Fantastical has an incredibly smart and easy way to capture events and data. And at the end of the day, power and ease are most important. When quickly planning an event or marking a task to be completed, it needs to be comfortable and quick. I don’t need to worry about populating sections of data. I want a smart application that knows how to fill in the useful information for me.

A major caveat of this powerful tool is the financial investment. The cost is steep, and if your workflow requires cross-platform applications, it is even more costly. The iPhone iOS application is 4.99, the iPad iOS application is 9.99, and the Mac OS application is a staggering 49.99. The latter has a 21-day free trial that might be worth checking out. The good news is that Flexibits, the software company who created Fantastical, offers a 20% discount for those in Education or Military service.

Whatever the case may be, the capturing of these dates, tasks, and reminders is well worth a 65 dollar investment, especially for ease of use and workflow.