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Imagine a productivity app with free templates, team collaboration, mobile-tablet-desktop synergy, and push notifications for task reminders and due dates. That sounds like a unicorn, but it’s not—it’s Milanote, and if you’re not using it, you should be.
Great Free Productivity Templates
Productivity nerds run into a common problem withfinding the right productivity app: paid templates. Now, granted, the templates don’t usually cost that much, but you usually don’t know if a template will work for you until you’ve spent some time with it.
So you buy one, try it, kinda hate it, and then buy another one. Twenty or thirty dollars later, you might not still have a template you like, and for that money, you could’ve gone out to eat or copped a great deal on some new clothes.
Milanote wins here. The productivity templates in the app are all free, and they’re bonafide templates, featuring anEisenhower Matrixand a Kanban Board.
From your MilanoteHome, you can right-click anywhere to add aNew Board. Double-click the new board, and you’ll see a box in the bottom right corner of your screen that saysChoose a template, where you can start to navigate through your template options. Click onMore Templates.
You can download Milanote across your devices from your preferred app store orthe Milanote website.
When you find theProductivity Templateoptions, you’ll see that there are only five, but don’t panic. Because Milanote is completely customizable, any of the 100+ free templates can be tweaked to fit your needs.
I’m an Eisenhower Matrix (EM) adherent, so I was pumped to find an EM template ready to go, but you’re able to see below that I’ve tweaked my board to include my current roster of freelance assignments so that I can keep track of my work life in one convenient space.
Scheduled Tasks, Reminders, and Assignments
Milanote comes with to-do lists where you can create and schedule tasks, similar to othertask management apps. When you add a to-do to aTo-docard in Milanote, you have a few options—you can set a due date, schedule a reminder, and you can assign that task to any person you’ve added to that board.
If you’re running a small creative team or maybe just using Milanote to keep your work and personal life all in one place like me, these options give you lots of flexibility for keeping up with everything. Having the mobile app for Milanote is key, here, so that scheduled reminders will ping your push notifications if you’re not at your desktop.
Quick Add Tasks or Notes on Mobile
Speaking of mobile, you can addQuick notesright from your device to be organized later on your desktop under the Quick notes tab on the top right of your Milanote window. Quick notes allows you to createTo-dos, a simpleNote, or add anImageyou found that you’d like to add to a board later.
You can also access all of your boards right from your device, but you do lose the perks of a visual layout that you get on desktop.
Drawing on Milanote
Milanote gets to be a lot of fun if you have a tablet. The app lets you scribble anywhere with the Draw tool, so tablet users have a particular advantage over desktop users. you may also use aSketchcard that’s resizeable so that you can keep your drawn idea in one particular place on your board. These features make it a contender to thebest stylus note-taking apps.
Drawing in Milanote on a tablet makes the app a game changer for anyone leading a creative team or even just a creative person who doesn’t vibe with bullet-point orto-do list productivity apps. Visually oriented people will like the drag-and-drop accessibility of the desktop app alongside the creative freedom to just scribble with a stylus or Apple Pencil.
Milanote’s particular value proposition here is its free tier of membership—you get 100 cards free, and an extra 100 for referring friends to the app (20 cards per friend). Download it, take it for a spin, and see if this creative app that’s actually a productivity app will help you keep track of your life.
