Emery Review: Personal Daily Planner For Better Prioritization

The constant ping of notifications.

The ever-growing to-do list.

The jam-packed calendar.

No modern professional is a stranger to the distractions that sabotage productivity.

Without a system to keep the chaos at bay, each workday brings trouble with tedious tasks that sucks time and energy.

According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, knowledge workers spend nearly 30% of their workweek on email alone.

Clearly, we need strategies to cut through the clutter and zero in on high-impact priorities.

This is where Emery’s intuitive daily planner comes in.

If you’re looking for a solution that helps you pick the right tasks to work on at the right times, Emery might be the solution.

Here’s why:

TL;DR Emery Summary

Emery is an intuitive daily planning freemium app for Android, iOS, and the web to help busy professionals stay organized and focused.

It has a clean interface where you can see your tasks, calendar, and notes in one view.

The core of Emery is blocking off time on your calendar for appointments, tasks, and focus time. You set a “Focus of the Day” aka your top priority task.

Beyond daily plans, Emery lets you group tasks into projects and review weekly time tracking.

So you can zoom out and ensure you’re balancing time properly.

Emery is great for imposing structure on chaotic days. If you want a minimal daily planner to stay organized and focused, give Emery a try!

Emery Overview

Emery is a personal daily planner designed to help busy professionals organize their days and focus on what’s important.

The core of Emery is the daily planner, where you can block off time for appointments, tasks, and focus time.

I love that it encourages you to set a “Focus of the Day” aka one important task to concentrate on amidst the hustle and bustle.

The planner pulls in your calendar appointments and allows you to add tasks directly, too. It’s all centralized in one helpful overview.

Beyond daily planning, Emery also lets you maintain broader organization with project collections. You can create lists of related tasks and group them together.

For example, you could have a “Website Redesign” collection to track all your pending tasks and notes on that project.

This helps you zoom out and make sure you’re allocating time properly across different initiatives.

Writing down my random ideas and notes is one of my weaknesses, so I appreciate that Emery allows you to easily capture these in the notes section.

You can turn notes into actionable tasks with one click, too!

At the end of the week, you can review how you spent your time and get feedback on where your efforts went.

Overall, Emery seems like an excellent option for anyone seeking to impose structure and focus on their days.

It eliminates overwhelm by narrowing your view to just what’s on tap today.

What We Like About Emery

• Simple, clean UI that’s easy to use
• The “Focus of the Day” concept helps prioritize important tasks
• Centralized overview of calendar, tasks, and notes
• Easy to capture ideas and turn them into tasks
• Review weekly time tracking and productivity

Where We Wish Emery Did Better

• More calendar integration options beyond Google and Outlook
• Could use some more features for long-term planning and goals
• Might benefit from task dependencies or reminders
• It would be great if the calendar came with a built-in multiple timezones feature

Emery Features And Use Cases

1. Onboarding Process

Emery’s onboarding process is effortless.

Once you sign up and log in for a free/paid account, you will be redirected to the page shown below, which starts with explaining the three core principles of Emery:

After passing the core principles, you will be asked to write down your professional designation.

Next, you will be asked to choose from the following collections that you would like to focus on the most (collections are broad categories under which appropriate tasks can be placed.)

Once you select the collections and hit next, you’ll have to add tasks under each collection you set.

Next, and this is where prioritizing kicks in, you must select at least 4 tasks that you want to focus on this week.

As soon as you complete the weekly task selection, you will then have to select at least 2 tasks for today.

Finally, you will be asked to select the most important task(s) from the list you picked for today’s tasks. Once you complete this process, the last step that remains before onboarding is over is to connect your calendar.

Emery enables you to connect to both Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.

That’s it. Once your calendar account is connected to Emery, within a few seconds, your account will be ready. You will get this beautiful and easy-to-comprehend data about everything you did in the onboarding process.

2. Ease Of Use

This is what Emery’s main dashboard looks like:

To some, it can be overwhelming at first. And I can understand where they are coming from.

This is mostly because Emery has tried to chip in almost all essential features in a single page so that the individual does not have to go through context switching.

But the great thing about its user interface is that it’s still minimal, thanks to enough whitespace.

Even better? The left sidebar can be toggled on/off.

The following is the breakdown of Emery’s main dashboard:

• Left sidebar: Includes settings to view tasks and collections, and toggle between different task and calendar views.
• Notes panel: Besides the left sidebar, you get a notes section. It is a clean dashboard to take quick notes in a distraction-free interface and assign them to day and collection.
• Tasks panel: This is where all your tasks will be shown. Your tasks are divided into three subsections: the focus of the day, regular priority, and weekly tasks.
• Right sidebar: This is where your connected calendar will be displayed. Your tasks can easily be dragged and dropped into your calendar.

Overall, I really like the way Emery has consciously placed things near each other. It’s smartly done and saves time without jumping back and forth to countless web pages.

3. Time Blocking

Time blocking is one of the best things Emery excels at.

First things first: Because tasks and calendar panes are placed near each other, it is a child’s play to time-block or timebox with easy drag and drop.

To drag and drop a task in the calendar, just hover over the three horizontal lines and drag and drop the task to your desired calendar location.

You can then click on the task to give additional details.

That’s literally all there is to it. Can’t get any simpler!

4. Tasks And Planner

Emery allows you to plan both daily and weekly tasks. In fact, just like Todoist, Emery enables you to plan days and weeks in advance and as far as you can imagine.

To plan and add tasks for today, head over to Today from the left sidebar.

As discussed earlier, you will see the tasks section between notes and events/calendar panes.

Now all you need to do is add tasks on all three sections: focus of the day, regular priority, and weekly tasks.

Don’t forget to assign an appropriate collection to each task.

And talking about collections, all the collections you created/selected in the onboarding process will be displayed here:

To create a new collection, click on the + icon. Name your collection and give it a color of your liking.

Besides creating tasks for today, you can also assign tasks for days to come.

How?

Head over to This Week from the left sidebar.

A weekly calendar will open up. And beneath that, you will be able to add the focus of the day tasks and regular priority tasks.

Emery does a great job of calculating the total hours that you spend on each calendar category i.e., personal, business, school, meetings, etc. It is displayed in the top right corner.

These sub-categories will be the ones you have created on your connected calendar (Google or Outlook calendar).

You can even increase or decrease the size of this task creation section by simply dragging it up and down.

5. Weekly Reports

The weekly reports give you a summary of your productivity and time spent each week.

They help you analyze how you’re spending your time and make adjustments if needed.

The reports get sent to your inbox at the end of each week. So you’ll get a nice recap of the past 7 days.

The reports break down:

• Total completed tasks
• Total notes created
• Total overdue tasks
• Time spent by collections
• And time spent by calendar (work, meeting, etc.)

The weekly reports help you step back and analyze your time.

No more getting to Friday and wondering, “Where did my week go?”

Pricing

Emery comes with two plans: Basic and Pro.

The Basic plan is free and gives you quite a lot:

• Unlimited tasks, notes, and events
• Unlimited private notes for meetings
• 1 calendar integration
• Up to 5 active collections
• Drag and drop time blocking
• Syncing across devices

The Pro plan gives you more features for $49 per year. With the Pro plan, you get:

• Everything in Basic
• Unlimited calendar integrations (so you can connect all your calendars)
• Unlimited collections
• No “Scheduled via Emery” in your calendar events
• And more

There You Go

With countless distractions threatening productivity, professionals require solutions to stay focused and organized.

Emery offers an intuitive daily planner that helps you prioritize and give structure to your days.

Its clean interface and smart time-blocking features empower you to concentrate on high-impact tasks.

Its “Focus of the Day” concept zeroes you in on what matters most. The weekly reports give helpful feedback on time spent.

If you constantly grapple with overwhelm, Emery may be the right daily planning tool for you.

Its simple, focused approach cuts through the clutter, so you can work smarter.

Give the free version a try and see if it brings calm to your busy days.