Craft 3 is shockingly close to my ideal productivity app

The squad down the note-taking app Craft released a caller version this week, aft months of beta investigating and much than a twelvemonth successful development. It includes tons of changes, but 3 large ones: caller ways to benignant your documents; a caller conception called Collections that lets you compile and signifier related stuff; and a clump of caller task-management tools.

Craft works connected Apple devices, Windows, and the web, and the squad says Android is coming eventually. I’ve been investigating the beta for the past fewer months, and I perfectly emotion it. This caller Craft is the champion app I’ve tried for managing some large projects and day-to-day life. It’s inactive missing a fewer features, peculiarly connected the to-do database front, but it is some beautifully designed and precise powerful, and it conscionable works the mode my encephalon does. I americium an incorrigible tester and switcher of note-taking apps, but I haven’t discontinue Craft successful months. And I don’t program to.

Craft 3 is really a pivot for Craft, oregon possibly an un-pivot. Over the past fewer years, the institution started to absorption much connected concern users and selling to companies, co-founder Balint Orosz tells me. It added tons of permissions-management stuff, analyzable sharing tools, concern integrations, and a cardinal templates for mediate managers, each chasing the lucrative but elusive B2B market. “We were nary longer this elemental merchandise that anyone tin adopt,” Orosz says, “but we besides weren’t analyzable capable for businesses.” Craft got stuck. That’s besides astir erstwhile I stopped utilizing the app.

About a twelvemonth ago, though, Orosz and his squad conscionable bailed connected that program and decided to get backmost to gathering an app for regular people. That meant simplifying everything astir however it works, giving radical the tools they really request to negociate their beingness (and, sure, their work) successful the app, and ditching the rest. “We conscionable said, ‘let’s physique the champion instrumentality that helps you signifier your life,’” Orosz says. “Your entire life.”

Documents are inactive the halfway of Craft, but successful mentation 3 determination are galore much ways to adhd color, doodles, and backgrounds to them — Craft intelligibly noticed however galore radical similar designing their Notion pages and decided to stress the aforesaid feature. Collections are besides somewhat Notion-like: if you adhd a postulation to a leafage it turns into a sortable array of accusation and adjacent different documents, truthful you tin signifier things similar you mightiness successful a Notion database.

For me, though, it’s the task integration that makes Craft truly work. There’s a caller Tasks presumption successful the app, which some compiles each your documents with tasks wrong and provides a spot to conscionable marque a standalone to-do list. In the Calendar view, you’ll spot each your tasks owed contiguous alongside your calendar events and regular notes. Tasks tin person owed dates, but not overmuch other — if you’re looking for priorities oregon recurring tasks oregon adjacent subtasks, you’re amended disconnected elsewhere. Orosz says he’s good with that. Most people, helium thinks, conscionable privation checkboxes. 

I besides mostly privation checkboxes, truthful this setup works for me. The app besides integrates with Apple Reminders, which is an casual mode to seizure caller things. But the Craft diagnostic that truly puts it implicit the apical is the caller quick-add window. You pat it and a substance container appears — you tin constitute successful that substance container and past take to nonstop it to your regular note, make a caller note, oregon conscionable adhd a task to your inbox. Or you tin take not to record it astatine all, and it sits successful a database astatine the bottommost of your screen. It’s 1 of the fastest ways I’ve seen to conscionable constitute thing down, which fewer apps negociate to get right.

Craft inactive costs $10 a period oregon $96 a year, though the institution is moving a half-off merchantability to observe the update. For Orosz, this motorboat is conscionable the opening of a caller mentation of the app. The squad has already integrated notes, tasks, and calendar events into 1 place, “and astir apt adjacent twelvemonth we’re going to travel up with radical arsenic a halfway entity,” helium says. He thinks radical signifier their lives astir important people, arsenic overmuch arsenic they bash dates and tasks, truthful humans should beryllium astatine the halfway of Craft. 

The squad is besides moving connected caller templates and styling ideas, and are yet readying to physique a utile strategy for tagging documents. But they’re besides recently dedicated to conscionable keeping it simple, stupid. “If you privation to person a cognition graph with afloat 3D zoomable whatever, Obsidian oregon different much method focused tools volition bash that occupation amended for you,” Orosz says. “They’re extendable, they’re little opinionated.” After years of gathering immoderate instrumentality immoderate mediate manager asked for, helium seems precise excited to get backmost to gathering the 1 helium wants. Which turns retired to beryllium beauteous adjacent to the 1 I privation too.