This evaluation of Routine was made on March 15, 2025. Please note: these are very rough notes.
Routine is a task management (“work everything”?) app that has a few interesting design choices and other questions:
It has natural language user input so that you can schedule recurring tasks via NL, which is cool.
It offers time blocking (e.g., “this task will take 30 minutes”).
It has a hotkey for a “dashboard” view on macOS, which serves both as a quick entry view and also a heads up widget view showing the time until next task, current task, time left, and other information you can interact with. This basically expands the notion of a quick entry bar into something more complete, which is cool.
It does focus on quick capture, including of notes, which is nice. That is, you can just enter arbitrary text into the quick capture system and capture it as an event, a task, or a note, without thinking about what it is.
It kind of tries to be an everything app, and includes a lot of notes features. It kind of seems like it wants to be everything, and that includes a PKM.
It isn't clear what the fidelity on recurring tasks is/are. In OmniFocus, one can schedule a recurring task to recur from completion vs from the scheduled dates. I don't think Routine supports this level of distinction.
Everything is back-synchronized to Google Calendar. I'm not sure about whether or not this is a good thing. It has the unexpected consequence of cluttering gcal with various events that are relatively small and also, not really events. It is /probably/ not the intended case to schedule literally everything on the calendar. – I think that actually, it would be nice to have support for smaller tasks on the calendar that would be reflected (e.g., “I want to do this at night”) generally, but not specifically on it.
It only has one schedule. Unlike Motion, you can only set “work hours” and you can only time block in “work hours”. I suppose this is fine for people who want to only work on a very fixed schedule daily. Motion allows each schedule to have different schedules for different days. So, on Monday, you can “work” from 9-5 but on Tuesday you can “work” from 7-3 and that's no big deal. Routine doesn't support this level of fidelity.
Routine does have a paid plan, but the paid plan as it exists right now doesn't offer a trial.
The business has outside investment, e.g., Y Combinator. This is good and bad maybe – because they both have money, but are also probably expected to deliver a return-on-investment that's probably going to be a little bit wild given the fact that this is pretty close to other apps in the space.
Overall, I'm optimistic about Routine. However, it does seem to miss enough details that I'm not sure I can rely on it. Specifically, I feel like the lack of flexibility about recurrence is enough to make me not use it.
Many elements of the design are nice, like the “agenda” view that shows the day's schedule with the details that are specific to that day, along with the tasks for the day that aren't scheduled. The overall UI design is stylish and seems nice compared to Motion, for example. But it also lacks the polish that one would maybe expect. For example, you cannot reorder some tasks via drag-and-drop – this is on the roadmap.
I found the experience of scheduling tasks on mobile to be generally a lot of work. Changing a scheduled item requires manually changing the time, not moving it by dragging on the calendar, which is not ideal.
I think that app developers face a really annoying set of problems trying to support Android, iOS, installed apps, and web. I feel for these developers.
If there's one thing I would settle on with everything I've found so far, it's that that I feel like Routine's roadmap and direction puts it in a different category of apps, like Notion, and that leads me to believe it might not be focused enough.
It does have a relatively large number of integrations, which may be nice in some cases. But the main thing with those is that the integrations are dependent on you being comfortable with all of these services talking to each other. In a corporate environment, the barrier to entry is higher without the typical security assurances that enterprises need to approve use.