jquintard

Notion is good at first, but quickly gets out of hand. At least it was my case. You can consider Routine (routine.co). It does everything that you mentioned.

You made me laugh :) Thank you. Means a lot!

You're right, TickTick is another tool in the space. We are trying to provide more speed through our keyboard shortcut and console but the idea is the same indeed, to have tasks and notes.

Thanks for the kind words.

Apple Calendar is something we are obviously considering.

As for console which is hard to exit, we get that feedback all the time. Unfortunately, even though it looks trivial, it is actually not super simple to do. I suggest you re-hit CTRL+SPACE to hide it, it is the easiest way. Otherwise, you need to reput focus in the console and hit CTRL+ESC.

As for the dependence on the Google ecosystem, we understand but, as discussed through other comments on this post, we had to start somewhere. We will expand later but it just made sense to start on Google given that we are going after professionals and that there are 400M Google Workspace accounts.

Hi. Indeed, it's far from perfect. We haven't had time to work on the offline/sync yet. You need to reload to get the new state. It's on the roadmap. Will be done soon.

The ability to add tasks and events in the Agenda view is in the roadmap indeed :) Along with drag/dropping a task onto this view.

Thanks. Very clear.

Thanks for your message. You're not the first one to report a blank screen. Very strange. We didn't see that before. You can send us an email at contact@routine.co and we'll try to dig deeper. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Relating to your last comment, I would be great to chat. I'd love to get your input: julien.quintard@routine.co if you want to reach out directly.

Thanks

Thanks lenova. Duly noted, we'll improve that as it's not the first time we get the feedback here.

We were definitely inspired by Sunrise. We tried to extend the idea by integrating tasks and notes as well.

Definitely agree. Looks like what you are describing is Routine (http://routine.co) :)

No inspiration from sorted3 but similarities with the circle on the logo indeed. The same could probably be said of many other productivity tools, like Sunrise :)

Regarding iOS, you can find it here: https://apple.co/399lDrW

We are not trying to say that Routine has been built around privacy like Protomail could say. We do not make such claims on our website.

But since we are asking users for their Google credentials, we thought it was more transparent to explain, for each service, why we needed it and what it meant. We prefer to be transparent than just ask for a bunch of permission without explanation as other services do.

And yes we are tight to Google because it was simpler for us to start this way. Again, most of the professionals we target use Google Workspace. In the future, the service could evolve and support other services like Outlook.

We could have released on the macOS App Store but there was no benefit at first. We want to control how many people use it at first to make sure that we fix the bugs as they come. We've been working on this for only a few months.

Let us check the problem regarding your 401 and come back to you. Sorry about that.

Hi Brajeshwar. Indeed, we need access to Google Tasks because all the tasks created in Routine are stored in a specific list in your Google Tasks account. We do not store the tasks on our server.

Thanks. Regarding the console, we know it's far from perfect.

For now, you can hide the console by re-hitting CTRL+SPACE.

Thanks mful for your message.

Recurrence is something we will improve. But you have pretty specific ones :)

We will actually add a planning view with a full week. We are definitely aligned on that. Stay put.

For the future dates, yes indeed it's not ideal. We are in the process of fixing that. Well spotted.

For the navigation, again, need to improve you are right. You need to ESC to come back to arrow navigation for now.

Clicking out of the console is not easy to solve unfortunately. We are on it as well. What you can do is either focus on the console and press ESC. Or you can hit CTRL+SPACE once more and it will hide the console.

We do support "do something on DAY at TIME for DURATION" but it's still a bit buggy. We need to improve it :)

Thanks for all the feedback.

No not yet. Definitely something we want to do but to be honest it won't be before 6 months at least.

Hey. Thanks for that feedback. We're going to look into this and we'll get back to you. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Routine's iOS app is written in native Swift.

We prefer to warn users instead of just using their Google Account.

As for why we use Google services. It's because most professionals do use Google Calendar. Some don't, we understand. We might serve them in the future but we have to start somewhere.

We advertise the desktop app (instead of the Web app) because Routine is intended to be used through a desktop-wide keyboard shortcut so you can capture thoughts and tasks from anywhere. A Web app requires that you switch to your browser, then find the right tab and click it to then be able to interact with the Web app. We believe it is too slow for a productivity tool. But some people do not have a choice (Windows) this is why we've answered them.

If you do not trust our service, we understand. We don't force you to use it. It's obviously your right.

But just to make things clear (which we explain in the Privacy section), all tasks are stored in your Google Tasks account. All events are stored in your Google Calendar. And all your notes are in your Google Drive. This means we store no data on our servers (for now at least).

That's a very good point. Definitely Apple's direction.

I think it will take quite some time to reunite both world. But maybe indeed, eventually, we'll have only the iOS app that will run on both iPhones and macs.

Note thought that there will always be a big difference in experience. On desktop, we want the experience to be center-ed around the keyboard shortcut, the console and natural language.

On iOS (at least for most people), it's faster to use a well-crafter UI/UX than typing natural language. Though again, in the future, we might go in the direction of voice.

Time will tell :)

Hey Jonas. Our team is too small for us to go after all the platforms right now unfortunately. But we do have a Web app: https://bit.ly/3rhkYLt

Hehe sorry about that. Yes I meant cannot.

The iOS app is native Swift. The desktop app is in Electron.

But we've taken another approach for the Electron app not to become as slow as Slack or Notion. We know many people complain about that.

To give just one example. The parser in our console has not been written manually in Javascript. Instead we wrote it in Ocaml (https://ocaml.org/) and we generate the Javascript. This allows us to have a code that is more reliable, maintainable and faster.

We do the same for many other parts of the product exactly for that same reason.

Hey Oras. I've added the Apply part. Thanks a lot for spotting that :) apply@routine.co

Regarding Todoist. It's obviously a great tool. But very generalist. Like Everynote for notes. We're taking more of a specialized direction for busy professionals: people who have a lot of meetings, want to capture non-actionable information (notes), have a lot of things going through their mind that they do not want to forget and a lot of tasks scattered everywhere, from email, chat (Slack/WhatsApp) and project management tools (Asana/Trello/Notion).

With Todoist, everything needs to be stored as a todo. We think this is too constraining. Some information is actionable (tasks), other not (notes). Both should be in a single tool.

Also, it's a productivity tool. It needs to be super fast. I don't want to have to switch to an app to capture something that is going through my mind. Or to copy/paste information from one tool to another. That's why Routine works through a keyboard shortcut that is available everywhere on your desktop. For now, you can only capture information, create recurring event, block time in your calendar etc.

But soon, you'll be able to join meetings, take meeting notes, glance at your upcoming events etc. all through one keyboard shortcut.

Thanks.

Notes taking app tend to be very generic. You can type text, create bullet points and checkboxes. But they it is for you to manually move stuff from one page or section to another to "represent" another day, time or topic.

In Routine, every note (being a page or a task description) can contain text, bullet points, media etc. But every checkbox turns out to be a full-fledged task that can be scheduled, opened to enhance with a description (which in turn can contain subtasks) etc.

We've basically closed the loop. Every note can contain tasks. And every task can be enhanced with a note. And then we tight those notes and tasks to what is happening in your life.

If you are in a meeting, you can take notes that will be linked to this meeting and its participants. If you create a checkbox (action item) in such a note, it becomes a task that you can postpone for later or schedule right away.

Notion is best for teams and does not have this notion of task, nor is it well integrated with your calendar. Likewise for Roam which is more for people who love to take tons of notes: researchers, journalists etc.

We do have a Web version but it is true that we do not advertize it very much because the desktop experience is what we want to push for. Feel free to give it a try: https://bit.ly/3rhkYLt

Hi Raju. We'll definitely put a pricing plan in place at some point. It will likely be something around $10/month for professionals. But we will almost certainly keep a free plan. I can't guarantee it because we are still at the beginning but it is likely.