Apple Watch Review Diary - Productivity Apps: OmniFocus, Trello, Evernote IFTTT


One key area that interests me with the Apple Watch is using productivity apps. Actually these are some of my favorite apps in general, just because they're apps that help me do every day stuff. There are many workflows, but three apps I currently regularly use are OmniFocus, Trello, and Evernote. All three of these have Apple Watch apps, so I wanted to take some time to figure these out.

Evernote is a great brain in the cloud for storing and organizing information. It's basically my paperless file cabinet, note taking app, and general information locker. With Apple Watch, it has a great streamlined experience. Basically there are two big buttons to input a new note and search. These two features will be the main reasons I'd fire up the watch app. Below that, you can scroll through recently viewed and recently edited notes. Mainly I'll want to input info since I'd prefer to just look at the phone for reading or editing anything. For this, there's a big "+" symbol to get you inputting a note quickly. When you click that plus button, you jump right into Siri dictation for that note. It works really well and pretty slick when you want to just "jot" down an idea or info.

I've been using Trello recently as a task manager. I've got it setup as a hybrid Kanban and GTD system and it's working pretty well for me. I recently got my wife on board and we moved our menu planning from Evernote to Trello. The Apple Watch app initially is a bit buggy, which shouldn't be surprising for this first round of apps, but it works. Again, we have some nice big icon buttons that are easy to manage. The watch app isn't great for dealing with cards and columns, but it's great for adding new cards. Similar to Evernote, pressing the "+" button and you're adding a new card via Siri dictation. From there, you select where you'd like the card, which is a little awkward, but more on a better idea with that in a minute. Overall, it's a pretty slick way to get random to-do items filed away on the go so you don't forget or worry about forgetting.

The third app here is the powerful OmniFocus. The Apple Watch app for OmniFocus is a part of the Universal iOS package, which can be purchased on its own or if you already bought the iPhone version you can add it on as a complete my bundle. OmniFocus offers a quick glance at tasks that are due, overdue, or coming up. New notes can be added by doing a force touch anywhere within the app and selecting the "+," which is different and pretty nice idea from the others.

Lastly I think it's worth mentioning IFTTT is really handy on with the Apple Watch. Since I'm using Trello as my main task manager right now, I've linked iOS Reminders to Gmail to send a special email to Trello. I've got Trello setup to add incoming email cards into my main inbox column. So, I can simply initiate Siri on the Apple Watch and tell it to remind me to do X. That goes into iOS Reminders, which IFTTT sees and triggers that email via Gmail. Kind of crazy bunch of dominos, but really handy for quickly inputing tasks just using Siri. Of course you could just use the iOS Reminders app, but that's not my preferred workflow.