Akiflow: Getting Smarter About Planning Tasks Every Day

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How I Use Akiflow to Tame the Chaos

I don’t think this struggle is uncommon. I tend to overestimate what I can get done in a day. This results in me always feeling like I’m behind without a way to keep my head above water. It doesn’t help that I have my hands in a lot of things. Yes, I’m a marketing consultant, but I’m also a PhD student, an artist, a volunteer, a TA, and someone with a lot of hobbies, interests, and people she wants to hang out with. Prioritizing time, and scoping it correctly, can be a challenge when everything feels important. That’s where Akiflow comes in.

I found Akiflow when I was dealing with just this issue. In Fall 2024, I wanted to find something that would help me manage my many schedules, prioritize tasks, take notes, and show me how much I accomplished. After using Motion and getting completely disillusioned with it (more on that in a future blog), I knew I needed to turn to something that could, at the very least:

• Reliably turn my tasks from Airtable into tasks in Akiflow
• Allow me to manage all of my calendars from a centralized place
• Provide me with time blocks for different types of work
• Give me a space for repeating habits
• Allow for easy adjustment when task scopes or plans changed

It’s been about 20 months with Akiflow, and I’m not going to act like everything has been 100% perfect, because that would be a lie. But the problem is not the tool. It’s still me, overscoping and learning how to break well-worn habits. With regular use of Akiflow, I have learned that it is only as useful as the time you put into it, and only if you take the information you are receiving and adjust your expectations accordingly. Does my list have 37 items on it today? Yes. Will I get to all of them? Of course not! But it’s also better than when I let 99+ things pop up.

How Akiflow Workds

Here’s how my Akiflow works in a nutshell, and how I work to keep it organized:

1. Start With Projects: All of my tasks live in specific projects. You can make your projects anything, but for me, I have a unique project for each client, and university class, as well as projects like “Personal,” “Wellness,” “Finance,” and “Reading.” I even have projects for volunteer positions I hold.
2. Organize Your Projects: Projects can be further organized with emojis, colors, and folders. I roll up all of my university projects into one folder. I tend to assign colors closest to the logos of my clients. You do what works for you!
3. Start Adding Tasks: One thing I really love about Akiflow is how flexible it is for task management, and how quickly you can move things around. This tool can be as robust or as simplistic as you want it to be. For tasks, you can set priorities, durations, and deadlines, add links and descriptions, and even decide whether the task should repeat. Sometimes I create tasks within each project, but Akiflow is also designed for big brain dumps into an inbox that can be further organized later.
4. Plan Task Dates: While you create your task, you can also choose a plan date. If you start with an inbox, nothing is dated, but you can also choose to plan by day, week, or month. There’s even a category for “someday” you can use to put tasks with no currently defined date.
5. Time-Block Your Tasks: To confirm that your plans are realistic, you can drag tasks with durations into your calendar and time block your day. Sometimes, I feel too busy for this step, but it’s exactly this step that helps you determine just how much time your current list will take, and whether something will need to move to another date.
6. Set Timers (or not) and Get to Work!: I don’t really use the Pomodoro Timer in Akiflow, and it’s just because I use a lot of other tools to keep time (see my Productivity and Time Management blog for more on that). But, if you need to set a timer, it’s a great place to track your progress.
7. Enjoy the Satisfying Sound of a Finished Task: When you finish a task, and if you have your sound on, Akiflow will play a triumphant trill when you are completed with something. I’m not sure if it’s a little rush of dopamine or what, but it works for me every time. So satisfying!

Is There One Right Way to Do Akiflow?

What I’ve described is one way to work in Akiflow, but what works for me don’t necessarily work for others. I have actually come at Akiflow in a bunch of different ways over the past couple of years. Sometimes I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the month mapping out my monthly and weekly tasks. Sometimes I’m just triaging what’s in my daily to-dos. Sometimes I fill up my inbox. It kind of changes based on my bandwidth and what I need help with at the moment. That might sound like a tool like Marvin would be better for me, but it’s some of Akiflow’s other tools that keep me coming back to it instead.

Let’s Talk About Calendars and Booking Links in Akiflow

One of the main reasons I left Motion is that I couldn’t get the tasks to automatically move from one management tool to another. However, one of the features I wanted to keep the same was being able to see all of my calendars in the same view and send a booking link to people who wanted to meet with me based on my availability across all calendars. Akiflow does that for me, but I do have one picky note that is keeping it from being totally perfect.

Currently, if you have a Google calendar or Outlook calendar, Akiflow can connect those for you. You can even toggle on and off select calendars and choose which calendars tasks appear on if you choose to time block them. I’ve recently been moving my emails over from Google to Proton, and it’s not possible at the moment to connect a Proton calendar. If I could do that (and time track on specific projects to bill to my clients), Akiflow would be perfect for my needs.

What About AI in Akiflow?

There’s one big piece of Akiflow you’re actually going to see missing from my review, so you may want to look at other reviews to get a feel for what Aki can do for you. Aki is the AI component in Akiflow that serves as a meeting assistant, inbox monitor, and summarizer, among other things. As someone who is trying to limit, and hopefully remove, AI from my life wherever possible, it’s not a functionality I use or care about. Luckily, it’s very easy to turn off and it’s not too intrusive if you choose not to use it. I honestly forget it exists half the time. If that’s something you’re interested in, though, you may be pleased to find out that Akiflow has that functionality!

Is Akiflow a Good Fit For you?

I obviously can’t tell you whether Akiflow will work for your use case, but I will say, I think Akiflow is great in the following situations:

• You are wearing a lot of hats and want a unified view for all of your tasks and projects
• You have several emails / calendars and want to offer a booking link that considers all of them
• You want to track your habits without thinking about adding them to a list or calendar regularly
• You feel like you overplan or improperly scope your day
• You have a lot of ideas and don’t want to lose them
• You want a visual representation of your progress toward large and small goals
• You’re looking to combine tasks with a Pomodoro timer and take your work in manageable chunks

I’ll close with sharing one other thing I did like in Motion that Akiflow doesn’t quite do but gets very close. When I would plan in Motion, I liked that I could split up a task if the duration wasn’t quite right for the amount of time I had, but I still wanted to make progress during that time. Akiflow can work around this by easily changing durations and duplicating tasks, but again, this is just a difference of the tools. I have to be pretty nitpicky to share anything I outright dislike about the tool. I actually signed up on the Believer level for that reason, a 5-year subscription that demonstrates my commitment to the tool and gets me into the beta test community.

Want to try Akiflow for yourself? Use any of the links I shared and you’ll get a discount (plus I’ll get a little referral bonus for my time as well). I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t love it. Give it a spin and let me know what you think!!