Sometimes the hardest part of completing your daily tasks is fitting them all into the day. When should you work on that project? Or should you workout first? What about that meeting—do you have time to run to the store before it? Trying to fit everything into your day can run you ragged. Time blocking is a system that’s supposed to help you—but you can get squished between those blocks. There’s no flexibility, and no ability to adjust when things change. On top of all that, even just scheduling your tasks is a task in and of itself—one that takes a lot of time and energy.
It’s no wonder over 41% of to-do lists don’t get done!
But it doesn’t have to be that way. SkedPal is a scheduling and productivity app that’s here to schedule your life for you—and help you get done what you need to. Let’s jump into our SkedPal review, and see if it’s right for you!
What Is SkedPal?
Based out of Dubai, SkedPal is what happens when you put blue-chip company executives and academic PhD’s in a room and all of them are passionate about the same thing—productivity. SkedPal isn’t just a to-do list or a calendar, it’s both, and it schedules your tasks based on your priorities and commitments. It “combines the best elements of creativity and structure to captivate your time and productivity.” It lets you eliminate manually planning your tasks, and manages them based on your work habits, commitments, and priorities. All you have to do is tell it what you want to do, and in what timeframe—and it will show you when to do it! This method has made over 6 million users happy.
How Does SkedPal Work?
The concept of SkedPal is simple. You input your tasks, and the AI schedules them out for you. It does this by looking at the time frame you’d like to complete the task in, your preferred work times, the task duration, and your availability according to your calendar. So what does that look life in real life?
Signing up for SkedPal is simple—you can access their 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Create an account with your email or Google account, and you’re ready to start. A tool is only as useful as you know how to use it, so SkedPal takes you through a through onboarding process. In it, you’ll learn how to add tasks, adjust your schedule, incorporate you calendar, and even turn emails into tasks in a “sand-box” version of SkedPal. Once you walk through it (a 5-minute process), you’re ready to start with the real thing.
The first step is to add in a to-do list. You can important lists that you have from other sites with a CSV file. But adding new tasks is easy. Simply press “add task,” type in your task, and hit “enter” to move to the next task. Unlike other to-do lists, SkedPal doesn’t have a natural language sensor to automatically schedule tasks for you—but you’re also not often scheduling exact dates. If there is something that has an exact deadline, input it manually.
As you create tasks, you can adjust when you want to do them. You can schedule a task for today, tomorrow, this week, next week, or someday. Smaller tasks (that take less than 30 minutes) will be bundled together on your schedule, so you still have larger time blocks. You can also indicate when in the day you want to complete a task, using SkedPal’s Time Maps.
These Time Maps give theme to your days, and help you budget time for various categories of work. SkedPal utilizes the power of categorizing these times, and even has a great video to explain it. Simply use the draw or erase tool and let SkedPal know when you want to do different types of work. More creative in the morning? Indicate that your mornings are for that work. Don’t work on Saturdays? Let SkedPal know. Want to answer your emails in the evenings? Put it on your time map. As you tag specific tasks with those categories, SkedPal will schedule them exactly when you want to do them.
The schedule is where everything comes together. SkedPal will already have your appointments in your calendar. Hit “Refresh Calendar,” and it will insert and schedule all your tasks too. You can see when you should work on each task, and manually adjust if needed. As you do this, your other tasks will rearrange as well. Know something must be done at a certain time? You can pin that task, and it won’t adjust with the others.
There are special things you can incorporate into your schedule. You can adjust the priority of a task—which affects when it is scheduled. High priority things are scheduled first. So if you have a low-level task that needs to be done today, and a high-level task that has to be done tomorrow, SkedPal is going to put the high-level task on today’s schedule first. You can also do things multiple times per week. If you add a task like “Exercise 3 times a week,” SkedPal will automatically schedule in three different workout times for this week.
As you look at today’s tasks, you can mark them off, and it clears them off your calendar as well! You can also see your Calendar Heat Map—which shows you how tight your schedule is on different days.
You can integrate SkedPal with Asana, and work together with your team. However, SkedPal isn’t for long-term projects, as you can only schedule 21 days out. But SkedPal does integrate with Zapier—that allows you to integrate with most anything. You can even forward emails to a special SkedPal inbox, which will then turn them into a new task.
And you can access SkedPal from most anywhere. It works on Apple, Mac, Windows, as well as iOS and Android devices. However, before you access it on your phone, you’ll have to set it up on your desktop first.
Is SkedPal Cheap?
SkedPal allows you a 14-day free trial to see if it works for you. Afterwards, it costs $14.45 per month to use the product—which is on the pricier end.
If you purchase a whole year with SkedPal, though, it is cheaper. At a year the rate comes out to only $9.95 per month.
SkedPal Alternatives
SkedPal Vs. Pagico
Pagico is another productivity app, that also helps you to see your tasks. It has a few pros over SkedPal, first that it is free for individuals. Pagico also allows you more flexibility—you can attach files or contacts or photos to your tasks, so everything you need is one place. The Timeline on Pagico allows you to plan far ahead for big projects, and their progress reports show you how much is completed.
However, Pagico also falls short of SkedPal in some respects. Pagico doesn’t schedule things for you like SkedPal does—you have to figure out start dates, and when to do things yourself. Pagico also doesn’t automatically connect to your calendar, so you have to input all tasks and all appointments yourself. Ultimately, SkedPal is useful for daily scheduling, while Pagico helps with long-term scheduling. You can read our full review of Pagico here!
Conclusions: SkedPal
It doesn’t matter how fancy, elegant, or advanced a tool is—its real value is in how much you need it, and how much you actually use it. SkedPal can be an invaluable tool if you need it and use it. It takes the time and stress of scheduling tasks off of you, and frees you to do what needs to be done. It doesn’t have many frilly extras, but it doesn’t need to. SkedPal can help you reinvigorate your days, and always know what you need to do.
