Effortless For Mac

Busy people know that keeping track of their tasks and assigning a limited time to each of them is the perfect way to boosting up one's productivity by managing one's working time without having to spend even more of it.

Effortless is a macOS app created to help you achieve this exact purpose via a minimalist and unobtrusive user interface.

Moreover, it allows you to stay focused on the task at hand and efficiently fight procrastination by giving you a list of todos to go through, with time intervals that you need to stick to and a countdown to let you know when they're up.

To add todos to your task list, you have to use Effortless's task entry screen where you can add chores just as easy as you would write them in a text editor, one under the other. There is a significant detail though: you also have to add the time interval needed to complete them at the end of each line.

After you've added all the tasks you want to track using Effortless, you can choose an assignment to keep track of by either clicking it in the app's status bar menu or by using the keyboard shortcut attached to it and visible next to the name.

It is important to mention that, once you switch to another task, the previous one's timer will automatically stop and it will continue once you switch back to it.

Once the task you're working on reaches the last minute of the countdown,  Effortless starts playing a tick-tock sound in the background to let you know that you have very little time left to finish it.

When the countdown runs out, Effortless will automatically play an alarm, letting you know that the time allocated for the current task has run out.

If you consider that the job needs a little more time to be done, more time can be added from the status bar menu by clicking the "Add 5 minutes" option to increase the time in 5 minutes increments.

Although it lives up to its name and we haven't encountered any serious bugs, the most noticeable being a white vertical band at the right of the task list, Effortless still needs a few extra features to make it the default task tracker for people who need a little more power from such a utility.

Moreover, adding a statistics recording and analysis module, support for Pomodoro task tracking, and integration with time/task management utilities such as Trello, Slack or Todoist would most probably make Effortless one of the best tools in its niche.