LifeOS is becoming a common term in productivity. Its the act of organizing everything from finance to your wedding, all the way to health and your couple goals. Whatever it might be, these tools aim to compile everything from goals to books you want to read.
Taking charge of your life is a big step.
Whether you've fallen from where you want to be, or just need a better view of how things are going, it's important to take some time to assess everything in a glance. From finance to health, to relationships and career, all these aspects of life being looked at will help your chances of success & change.
Many millions of people are exploring productivity tools to get organized, better manage their routines, improve their relationships, and grow into their 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond for a healthier, happier lifestyle.
Helps you plan priorities & juggle tasks.
Visualize all core aspects of your life goals.
See your most important life areas in one view.
Track and see progress with a habit, routine or goal.
Always keeping them in mind for your to improve on daily.
Our recommendations have come from testing the apps in person. These apps are more suited for those who want to visualize the key areas, plan them & get aligned daily to what the focus is, not just daily planning. If you're seeking more AI planning tools, try these.
Each of these apps has a different approach, but one that you'll be able to match up to with our advice. We only recommend the top tier tools for the job, that's our mission. Affiliate links cannot buy ranking, our statement on this.
Looking for something you can mould to your need entirely? Flexible & customizable?
Notion is a powerful all-in-one productivity tool that you can use to manage your "LifeOS" for all areas of life.
Millions of people have downloaded Notion for managing their life organization. Whilst Notion cannot plan the tasks for you, it can allow you to create areas for your life to view and manage daily. You can create databases that can be customized to your liking allowing you to see all your finances, goals, habits, tasks, notes, clips from the web, shared goals and so much more.
The benefit to Notion is that you can build whatever you like, from a to-do list app for your priorities, to a financial overview of spending. It takes time to learn but that's what makes Notion like a dream for so many people that want to plan and organize life.
Beautiful, minimal design and feel - to bring your own style.
Great for all who want to visualize their life set-up.
Can be used for all aspects of the life.
Totally customizable to your look and feel.
Works on all devices making it a great cross-platform tool.
Notion AI could be used to help search & ask questions about your life organization.
Plenty of YouTube tutorials and breakdowns for support setting up.
Takes time to learn and adopt (which you might not have).
Doesn't have planner abilities for helping you schedule workload.
Notion is free to use with unlimited blocks.
Notion AI & Plus include more features & AI capabilities.
Notion is very much the dominant life organizer.
It is used by students, professionals and grandmas around the globe. The layout of Notion allows unlimited possibilities making it very attractive for shaping and building your perfect layout to organize aspects of your life & day. Notion AI can help you correspond with your notes, entries & tasks, but Notion won't be good for helping you plan the perfect tasks, for that we'd recommend exploring daily planner apps.
Want to keep things simple and organize lists and what's next?
Todoist is a to-do list app designed with boards, calendar & lists.
You can use Todoist to create a task, add a list and manage it with multiple views. Many people like that you can use boards to create sections for each most important area of your life. You can then turn each task into deadlines to achieve, see it on a calendar or just write notes to keep a tally of you're going.
Todoist offers habit tracking, calendar view with Google & Outlook calendar and great tags/labels that allow people to organize tasks to their most important areas of life. From a personal perspective, I use this for planning goals with a project created called "Goals" that I visit once a week. This is a good way to see what's important to my life, then organize the tasks to make that a reality. It's simple, but task-focused and better for those who don't want in-depth set-up like Notion.
Easy to use and anyone can learn.
Good to capturing tasks that come into your life, each day.
Allows you to set deadlines, add due dates and plan out tasks to your needs.
Good tagging abilities for labelling tasks & filtering them down.
Great Kanban and calendar views for visualizing areas of life.
Requires some set-up time for the set-up that works best for your needs.
You don't have to add due dates to takes allowing them to be checklist-based.
Comes with reminders to help reduce forgetfulness.r
Not suitable for writing notes or journal entries.
Limited to task management focus.
Todoist is free to use with limits (no calendar modes).
There is an optional upgrade to $4 per month (annually) or $5 per month (monthly).
Todoist is a better life organizer for those who like to plan and think in actions.
It works for helping to create static goals and then using the to-do list abilities to break them down into manageable sub-tasks, collect important ideas you have using inbox and give them a deadline to help make them a reality. If you're looking for Todoist to help you visualize a mood board, or layout your goals as a document, this won't work as well as apps like Milanote or Notion.
Looking for something that resembles a note-taker, with more superpowers for life planning?
Evernote is a note-taking app with task and calendar management perfect for life organizing.
A long standing note-taking app in productivity market, it handles your notes - perfect for create a document of goals, a plan your your finance or your daily affirmations. Inside of notes you can create tables, add voice notes, even connect notes together. People love that you can use Evernote to collect things using the web clipper which makes it great for organizing ideas or mood boards.
As a life organizer, it works great for documents but also task management and connecting your calendar. You can see your calendar events via Google and Outlook calendar, then visualize them into the planner. This means it becomes your productivity hub allowing you to see notes, plan tasks & plan with your calendar.
Easy to use and approachable.
Good time-blocking features for making your goals reality.
Smart AI features for summarizing notes.
Note-first thinking for those who work best with note-taking apps.
Great features like tables for structuring your goals, finances, all aspects.
Link up notes to create a quick access to separated goals & organized areas.
You might have already used Evernote in the past.
Expensive option for many people looking to keep budgets down.
Very note focused and might not allow you to zoom out as well.
Evernote has free access up to 50 notes & 1 notebook.
Pricing starts from $7.99 per month.
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Evernote might be the perfect life organizer for someone who loves to use notes to capture.
If you want a traditional productivity tool that combines notes, tasks & calendar planning then you'll like Evernote. The app is fast, easy to use and works well for those who want to bake everything into a system. You can use tables to plan finance expenses, use a note to help visualize your work projects or get your life in order with a goals document you can pin within your notebooks or to Evernote home to visualize your objectives daily.
If you like apps like Evernote, try some of these alternatives.
Looking for something with mood boards and ways to turn vision boards into an organizer?
Milanote is a project planning app used by creatives.
It has features that allow you to plan visually and organize that to your life goals. Like a whiteboard, you can drag images, tasks and notes on the canvas. This makes it very popular with creatives who want to visualize their objectives. Think of Milanote as like Pinterest combined with Evernote, you can plot out your vision board, add tasks around the edges, take short notes and then come back to it daily to help shape how it looks.
For life organizing, it is popular as a way to stack up what's important to do using the board and task features, take important notes tagging them to an image and you can capture things to remember. If an idea or area needs more organizing, you can create boards within boards making it the perfect way to build on things as you use it.
Great for visual thinkers.
Playful way to create vision boards and plan side-by-side.
Connect up boards within boards for extensive organizing.
Quick capture on iOS app for easy on the go access.
Not as good for planning or extracting tasks.
You are limited in the free plan to 100 cards.
Free to use up to 100 cards.
Price per month is $9.99 per user.
You can add your team to expand it out.
Mac
iOS
Android
Windows
Web
If you're seeking a blank canvas to create the ultimate mood board of your life. This is the app!
It is easy to use, works great if you want to share and will help you plan and see notes next to tasks. Many people love the way it works, helps them to shape an idea and also how smooth it works on all devices. Milanote has been around for a long time and popular now with project management too.
Looking for something like Notion, but with more structure & help planning?
xTiles is a planning app with task, calendar & other features.
It has become popular in the last few years, as an alternative to Notion, but one that gives you more structure. xTiles has many templates that help you to layout typical areas of your life, from your week plan to your wedding planning. The goal of this is to give you more structure than Notion with a new AI feature to help you text to project your area you need to organize - for example - ask it to create a habit tracker.
xTiles has lots of features like mood boards, images, audio, documents & sheets. This is why it is referred to as Milanote and Notion combined, but it makes it great for those who want to create a life organizer and use the features like tabs to separate them out and plan with each canvas.
Great for visual thinkers.
Good blend between Notion and Milanote.
Use the task lists to help see what's coming up.
Has abilities like spreadsheets and boards for planning & tracking.
Extensive set of templates for saving time designing your layout.
Not as attractive as other productivity tools.
Can be hard to learn and adopt to.
Free to use with limits.
$5.75 per user, per account to unlock features.
The premium includes premium templates too.
If you looked at Milanote with envy, but wanted something more structured xTiles could be the answer.
xTiles is friendly and great for life organization. Splitting up your plans into tabs, using the templates to help save time and building on your ideas visually will make it your home for goals, spreadsheets, timelines and much more. You can share you xTiles projects with others that could make it easier to share your plans as a couple and see it together to better plan them out.
Looking for something that gives you your habit and planning in one?
Griply is a to-do list app with habit and life planning in one.
Making splashes in the productivity market, Griply is trying to help people organize their life in one app. They believe the pillars to organizing your life are goals, habits and tasks. This is a unique combination of features, allowing you to see your habits being track, tasks and projects aligned and the life "areas" to visualize and grasp. The thing that makes it most attractive to use is that the lifeOS areas are set-up for you, meaning you just need to use the document to help plot everything in and even add a cover image to make the goal feel more achievable.
This is an up-and-coming app that many people are looking to combine their Notion, Todoist & Habitify use into one.
Easy to use and solid design.
Great to combine everything into one place.
Works on all available devices minus Android.
Doesn't have canvas modes.
Lacks an Android app.
Free to use with limits.
Upgrade at $29.99 per year.
They run lifetime offers which are attractive to save money long-term.
We recommend Griply as a good app that gives you an alternative to Notion, without too much noise.
If you're hunting for something with that combination of habits, tasks & documents for planning your areas with the structure to just jump in, you'll love Griply. They also have a wide range of access on iOS, Windows, Mac & web too making it approachable for most people. The price point of Griply isn't crazy too, and much more reasonable if you're going all-in.
Looking for something more unique with a zoom out on life as a whole?
Timestripe is a planner app with a view to the future.
You can use Timestripe to plan next week, but you can also use it to zoom out into the future - see 5 to 30 years ahead. They have a feature for helping you to plan year goals, and your week goals, the objective is to help see what's ahead and filter down your task management. A lot of people like this ability as a way to re-think what your tasks should be aiming towards. If you organize your life and "get a promotion" is important - see that every single day increases your awareness to that goal in your tasks making it nice for seeing objectives.
You can also use notes to build on life areas, share boards with others, help weave in daily habits (or climbs as they call it) and connect your calendar to see routine items on your calendar.
Perfect for long-term thinkers.
Helps you track tasks, build boards & share tasks.
Each board is customizable with gallery & sections.
The habit tracking is good for helping to build new habits.
You won't like it if you plan just a few weeks out.
Free to use with limits.
$9 per month (billed annually)
If you know what you want to acheieve, Timestripe could be perfect for you.
The zoom out to the future years helps to align what you need to do to this week's tasks, but for others it could be a distraction. You can use boards to plan areas of your life and zoom out to organize those, the climbs feature helps to see your upcoming habits, and the clock features are nifty for looking at how your life is tracking (giving you some perspective) which might be nice for those who want a harsh awakening.
These recommendations are our most detailed & fine tuned picks:
The overall best life organization app is Notion.
It has the most flexible, customizable and build-your-own plans layout that millions have already embraced and use every single day.
The documents help for goals, the databases help for tasks and projects & their calendar app helps plan your week.
For those budget conscious, the best free life organization app is Notion.
You can use it with no limits and create a layout that you need.
You only need to upgrade if you want team features or Notion AI features which are an optional upgrade.
We'd recommend looking at Lunatask, it isn't on our core list.
But it does have E2E encryption, tasks and note-taking which many people have found helpful for organizing their life into documents.
There are more apps for time blocking, but our top recommendation is Griply or Todoist.
They are good for task management focused life organization helping you to create lists and planning out goals.
They both have time blocking nearby to help make it a reality.
Let's unpack some things people might ask about these types of apps?
It depends on what works best for you. If you have tried a notebook and need more structure, try a life organization tool.
If you find yourself managing your life without them and doing well, there might be no need for one.
If you're on the fence, try it for 90-days and see how it makes improvements.
LifeOS is a productivity phrase meaning an app that organizes all aspects of your life.
It has been popularized by Notion's rise to fame and allows you to see everything you're working on in one place.
Aesthetics is important to many who want to open it every day.
We'd say Griply & Notion are the most attractive tools in this case.
The ultimate aesthetics could be designing your lifeOS using your stylus, tools like Zinnia are popular tools to use your iPad to organize your life.
The top recommendation is Lunatask or Sunsama.
They both have a good experience for those who have ADHD.
The guided planning in Sunsama are great for focused work & weekly objectives for planning life.
Start with what areas of your life you're looking to work on (eg. finance/health/work/career)
Begin to shape objectives for the next 12 months and where you'd like to be.
Bring this into a document format.
Take this and use one of the life organizers to help plan it in to see it daily.
These aren't dedicated life organizers, but they will help you get life organized in their own special ways:
Sunsama is a notable tool if you want a more mindful way to plan tasks.
It doesn't do zoom outs as well as some of the apps in this list.
It has features like weekly objectives, guided planning & focus modes for your tasks.