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... and Structured is okay, too.

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I took a look at Structured when it first showed up a while back. Since it prefers to work within the Apple ecosystem I couldn’t use it for work because we’re a Google shop. Since then I’ve started using the native-ish Apple internet accounts -> Apple ecosystem integrations, which provide an indirect Google integration. For apps that support the stuff Apple ships, that works pretty well.

In the case of anything to do with a calendar, where Google Calendar is providing the back end, there’s going to be a certain amount of split living if you don’t want to just go live in Google Calendar’s web and mobile apps: Any video conferencing integrations you’ve got will require a manual tweak for events created outside Google’s web or mobile apps, and I’d argue Google’s own availability widget is better because it is more transparent.

But at the boundary of working with your calendar as opposed to working on your calendar, Apple’s stuff is fine. You can tell where stuff is scheduled, you can use the iOS and macOS widgets and alerts, you can get the benefits of Siri and Apple Intelligence integrations, etc.

Structured is a timeblocking tool. It shows you your Reminders, it shows you your calendars, and you can drag reminders into a list of your appointments for the day where they fit. It offers a few extra things, like assigning an energy level to each item so you can keep track of how sustainable your day’s plan is.

Yep, there are other ways to time block. Reminders and Calendar integrate with drag-and-drop now, so you can literally drag a Reminder out of a list and into your calendar to schedule it if you like. Structured refines the idea a little:

To start, you can configure which calendars and Reminders lists it can work with. I’ve got some “to-read,” “to check out,” etc. Reminders I don’t care to ever time block, so they stay out. I’ve got a few other things that are super granular, and generally opportunistic, so they stay out. I leave in Reminder lists for broad areas of concern: Each of the three functions I direct at work, a few lists for broad initiatives or concerns, and a couple of domestic sphere things.

In the main Structured screen, you get a day view that shows all the scheduled blocks from your calendars.

The Reminders from the top of the list and the Inbox area can be dragged in to the day’s schedule. That’s the core idea.

For instance, just now as I was sitting here typing, I couldn’t unsee a Slack notification from someone working over the weekend. I made a Reminder in my inbox, gave it a due date of tomorrow and kept moving. Tomorrow morning, when I triage and block my day, it’ll be in the list at the top of the day ready to be dropped in and time blocked.

For $15/year to unlock access to your calendars and Reminders instead of just using its internal appointment and calendar model, that seems fine: It’s an overlay that lets you manage your time in a certain style.

There are a few other things that are potentially handy:

First, you can add subtasks to a calendar item. They’re visible only to you and they don’t turn up in Structured’s task model. GTD people will probably grind their teeth at the idea of having another inbox, and that’s reasonable. I think these are probably useful less as a whole unit of work and more as ticklers or reminders. The immediate idea I had for them was to add them to 1:1s and other meetings where I need to check in on something. There are other ways to do that.

Second, there’s an AI assistant (using Apple Intelligence) that helps with subtasking a given item. I gave it a try on a few things where I had a loose list of next actions copied into the task note from somewhere else, and it did okay picking out the work items and making subtasks out of them with the prompt “subtask based on the notes.”

Third, there’s a “Replan” feature that lets you visit the purgatory of tasks that have passed their due date and put them back into circulation (either by turning them back into Inbox candidates or giving them a new date).

Oh, it also provides a web app with a Pro ($15/year) subscription. I am trying it out on my iPad Pro with a keyboard (more or less my laptop replacement) so I haven’t used that much.

There’s also one glaring oversight: No search. That’s on their roadmap. If you want to find things, you need to either pick through future dates or go back to Reminders and search from there. I wish it had search, and it should have search, but the app didn’t start life as a task manager, it started life as a time blocker.

Structured is interesting because it can break either way in terms of how much of your task management life it takes over:

Because it starts from its own internal task and planning model, you could use it as your sole todo app, understanding that it won’t lend a lot of support to your conception of task containers, whether those are “Areas,” “Projects,” “Lists,” or whatever. If you have a bunch of plates spinning in disparate areas, I don’t think it’d be a good desert island tool, because you’d probably end up shimming in some kind of meta layer that would end up hiding work or making it fussy to manage.

(There is, btw, a ticket in their roadmap for filtering, folders, etc., and the comments on that thread tell you all you need to know about how many ideas people have and what a recipe for UI messiness containers (projects, areas, whatever) could be. Good luck, Structured team.)

As an augment to Reminders, it sort of shrinks in ambition but gains in enabling easy timeblocking the work you’re deeply organizing elsewhere. For instance, my Reminders set up has several groups:

Within those groups you might see lists like:

The groups provide high-level segregation of the modes I operate in. The lists are either very tactical enumeration of a bunch of little things to get a household project done, or just work items that fall under a broad area of concern. Because I like my “big dumb list,” the Reminders “Scheduled” filter lets me see everything I put a date on, and the “All” filter just shows all of it by list. That more or less gives me the best of both worlds: Filtering to preserve attentional resources, and broad visibility to reassure myself nothing is hiding somewhere.

Structured just provides a sort of last mile for turning those things into action within the constraints meetings and 1:1s introduce into a given day.

Yesterday I wrote up GoodTask , which is more of a Reminders UI enhancement skin than a time blocker. It has some time blocking capabilities, but nothing quite this refined for timeblocking specifically. It’s more like a way to wedge a lot of OmniFocus’s Perspectives into the Reminders database while providing some ways to add metadata that are less fussy than Reminders itself. You could use the two together and never even look at Reminders itself if you wanted.

Ecosystem digression

Because I try very hard to keep third-party apps out of my life, Structured and GoodTask are interesting edge cases. Because they’re inexpensive and don’t mess with the underlying data in Reminders and my calendars, I’m okay with them. They’re just augments. If they stopped working tomorrow, I’d be left with the basic tools again, and still on a footing of having my data and being able to work with it in tools that are good enough. They’re sort of like Greasemonkey scripts I can rent cheaply, just for apps.

I could choose a second order of rabbit-holing about whether or not the Apple ecosystem is forever. I’ve decided that if the Apple ecosystem ever ends up not being forever, some change in life circumstances must have made any todos I was tracking irrelevant to the current moment.

Okay. Enough. The problem I’ve been thinking about this weekend is “where to keep things to do.” I’ve made a choice (Reminders) and have a couple of tools to augment it.