The brilliance of the Apple Design Award–winning task app Things is that it helps you focus on the tasks you need to complete now, while making you comfortable hiding tasks that can wait.

What we love: Categorising to-dos with a start date so they automatically pop into the Today view when it’s time to get started. (Things can also differentiate evening tasks, if you like.) Need to track a multistep task? Embed a checklist in the item’s Notes section.

Quick tip: Easily add formatting to a task’s Notes section using Markdown. To create a header, for example, start a line with #. Or to italicise or highlight words, surround them with a * or two colons, respectively.

Meet the creator: According to CEO and founder Werner Jainek of developer Cultured Code, “unrivaled simplicity” is key to Things. While many apps tout new features in every update, he says, Cultured Code focuses on “making the concepts that we’ve had in the app even simpler.”