I’ve been playing with a lot of third party productivity apps and you know what I’ve discovered - it’s best to stick with the defaults, at least in terms of data storage. I’ve been missing things because I haven’t been seeing them, I forgot which app I’d put it in (I appreciate this is my problem).
On sitting back and thinking about what I have to manage going on and how I want my data to be stored, here are the apps I’m using with iCloud:
- For my Calendar I remain stuck in the default app camp, whilst it isn’t the prettiest I like being able to see the date on my home screen with it’s app icon and it does the basics fine. I don’t micro manage everything on my personal Calendar so fits the bill quite nicely
- For my Reminders I’ve switched over to GoodTask, it’s a much better interface to iCloud and I like both the Today widget and Apple Watch complications
- For my Notes I use Apple Notes for everything. I write posts like this one in there, store images or receipts etc.. and food recipes. I like the simplicity of it and the fact I can do both handwritten and typed notes
- For my Photos I use iCloud Photo Library
- For my journal I back up DayOne to iCloud rather than sync with their service
These are the areas that are most important to me.
The only data in the cloud outside of iCloud that I rely on is Gmail and Blog posts.
For the first time in a while I’m content with this setup and for me even though the apps are pretty basic I find all the extra functionality in apps like OmniFocus adds unnecessary complication (for me) and I spend more time messing with my systems (and tags I don’t need) rather than actually doing stuff.
