Calendar apps can often be confusing, and with so much of our lives tracked in social networking apps like Facebook, they’re rarely complete. Monday is the answer to that issue that you’ve got to try. It’s a clean and elegant calendar app where you can create appointments, manage tasks, and track social events within a beautiful interface. It’s beautiful, simple, and convenient — qualities that most calendar apps lack or overdo.
Monday has certainly delivered more than just good first impressions. I’ve been using it for the past few weeks and I can say that it’s made scheduling and task management a delight. Though you need an invitation to access Monday, its feature set and the overall pleasant user experience makes the wait worthwhile. Let’s take a look and see why you should give it a try.
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Easy Scheduling and Multiple Views
Welcome to Monday.
After signing up for a Monday account, you’re taken to the calendar overview where a welcome tutorial awaits, eager to guide you through the basics.
Scheduling is very easy to pick up. Click on “Add a new activity…” to add a new event, add the duration (e.g., 2:00PM–12:00AM) and the activity title. Hit Return or Enter to save. Moreover, if you’d like to assign the activity to a different date, just drag and drop the activity to the new date to reschedule.
Monday is flexible as it is simple. Considering the different ways people use their calendars, Monday allows you to view your weekly or monthly agenda. On the top lefthand corner, you can switch from Month to Week view depending on your preference. Personally, I prefer to view and manage my todos and events by week as it allows me to focus on this week’s tasks and appointments scheduled.
An overview of the current and succeeding months.
On the top righthand corner of the app are two ways to locate a specific date without having to scroll up or down your calendar. Either click on a specific date within a two-week view or the actual calendar icon at the top righthand side of the app. Clicking on the latter opens another sidebar where the current and succeeding months are displayed in full. Once you select the date, the calendar will immediately jump to that week or month. If you’d like to go back to the current date, just click on Today.
Smart To-do Management
Although calendars are primarily for keeping track of one’s schedule, Monday can be your to-do app as well. It gives you that added pressure to get the job done within a specific time period.
Creating a to-do is pretty straightforward: any activity created without a duration is treated as a to-do item. Just click on the date, then “Add a new activity…” and type away. If you’d like to rearrange the sequence, just drag the task above or below another.
Add details to your events and todos.
Clicking on an event or todo opens a sidebar where you can add more details as notes. You can also set how long it would take to do the task. Finally, in the likely event that you have leftover tasks on your list, Monday automatically moves your untouched to-dos to the next day to save you the trouble of deleting, rewriting, and rescheduling them all over.
The Social Calendar
When Facebook integration came into the picture, I realized that this would mean adding 300+ birthdays to my calendar and 400+ people to contacts list. It made my address book messy and the birthdays filled every month of my calendar. What’s more, the notifications just wouldn’t stop buzzing about! I eventually decided to turn it off for good.
Facebook birthdays and events on Monday.
So, you can imagine the skepticism when I saw that Monday could sync your Facebook events and birthdays as well. What surprised me though was how clean and organized Facebook events turned out to be when synched to Monday. In Week view, birthdays are placed at the bottom, which you can click to view the details of the event. In Mont view, Facebook events are visible as a short and clickable link as well.
For users who use Facebook often for event planning and collaboration, this is a terrific feature to have. With this in mind, I do hope to see calendar integration with apps like Eventbrite where it is easy to register and schedule events and conferences.
My Suggestions for Monday
At its current state, Monday has every important aspect in place. The design is new and welcoming, and it’s not bloated with useless features that would just add clutter.
I would like to see a quick entry feature initiated by a simple keyboard shortcut. With this, I can easily create tasks without the extra clicks needed to jump to certain dates. Moreover, the ability to create and schedule events across dates would make scheduling more accurate, since there are instances when I’d have events that last for more than a day.
An Excellent Calendar, Standalone or Synched
Overall, Monday is a terrific calendar app to plan, schedule, and organize your tasks, social events, meetings, and appointments. It does so within a clean and elegant interface that takes away any form or feeling of overwhelm due to cluttered design and unnecessary features. And while synchronisation with Google/Facebook calendars is useful and convenient, you can always use Monday as your standalone calendar for all of your scheduling and to-do management needs.
The best part? Monday is free to use and in active development. You can share your thoughts and feedback using the Give Feedback link under Account menu and receive a response from Andri Möll, the developer, in a few days’ time. I’m crossing my fingers that a mobile version is in the works, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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