Anyone who finds their capacity for organising the chaos of modern life as it continuously accelerates out of control a trifle overwhelming might welcome this increasingly pretty app. Originally designed with neurodivergent people in mind, the app is great for anyone looking to sharpen their focus and manage overwhelming complexity and check the tone of what they send out into the world.
From breaking down a brain dump into a project plan with bitesize tasks and then feeding yourself those tasks one at a time to help you focus better and get more done, estimating how long something might take to accomplish, adjusting the tone of your writing or getting advice on the emotional tone of something someone else has written, weighing up the pros and cons of a decision or simply suggesting recipes that make the most of whatever is left in your fridge and store cupboard, Goblin Tools is, at last, an app to manage your whole life.
I have written before about productivity tools and tried to sound enthusiastic but this time I have hit gold. Thanks to the rise of our future AI overlords, we have Goblin Tools: an app that offers to turn the chaos inside your head into an ordered plan of action, make your writing stand out, check your writing sounds professional, friendly and engaging, and will even help you turn whatever random ingredients you find in your kitchen into something fit to eat. Discovering this was one of those rare moments where I knew I had found something I didn't know I needed in my life before, something I now would never want to be without.
Where to find Goblin Tools
Now available as a web app and as a formal app on the Google Play Store and ioS AppStore, you can engage with Goblin Tools however suits you best.
Remember to create and account and sign in so Goblin Tools remembers what you have done and you can take your planning work with you wherever you go.
Quick aside - you should use work tools for work (even if you use Goblin Tools for everything else!)
I should point out (before someone responsible does so for me) that if you are planning workplace projects, that you should check whether your employer is happy for you to feed work-related information into Goblin Tools or whether there is a corporate AI bot that you are supposed to use instead. For anyone working at the University, everything work related should only be fed into the corporate version of Copilot - and even then you should check you are signed in and can see the little green shield in the top right corner so you know outside agencies are not able to see what you are working with.
Getting productive with your little digital helper
From brain dump to action plan
Sometimes, life gets so hectic that just compiling a meaningful list of tasks can become deeply challenging. It can feel like by the time you are settled into one task, a dozen others are popping up to compete for your attention. The world of study and work swirls like a storm of competing demands and it is easy to succumb to paralysis by analysis - spending more time planning out what you need to do that there is no longer any time to do it! Happily, there is now a free app and website called Goblin Tools that uses AI tools to help you organise your life and express yourself in writing.
Tell Compiler everything you need to do in some order in any way that makes sense to you and it will turn it into a simple task list and invite you to turn it into a Magic To-Do List.
Magic To-Do helps you break down those tasks into more manageable chunks, breaking tasks you are unsure how to approach into suggested steps and even estimating how long each step will take to complete, allowing you to plan your work easily and completely in mere moments.
You can drag and drop tasks using the crossed arrows icon on the left to reorder them.
Click on the magic wand button beside a task, and the AI will break the task down into suggested steps and list them as sub-tasks. If you find the suggested approach unhelpful, click the More (three dots) button beside the subtasks you don't want and choose to delete them or to get rid of all of the subtasks, click the More button beside the main task and choose the mop icon labelled "remove all subtasks".
If you can't work out how to do something, you will find it listed under 'More'.
How long will this take?
If like me, your ability to estimate how long any particular task is going to take is more miss than hit, you might enjoy using Estimator. Sometimes I am spot on, sometimes I get more done in a morning than I thought I could accomplish all week, and at other times the day ends and I just don't know where the time went. If you have similar experiences, Goblin Tools' Estimator can give you a broad estimate of how long a task might reasonably be expected to take. This can also help if you are supervising others on a project or at work, letting you know roughly how long you should be allowing before wondering why something isn't getting done.
Estimator is built into Magic To-Do - just click on the more (three dots) and choose Estimate to get an estimate of how long tasks and subtasks will likely take.
Better emails (and WhatsApp messages, etc)
If you ever find (or just worry) that what you have written in an email or assignment does not come across to your audience the way it sounded in your head, Goblin Tools has a couple more useful tools to help you out:
Formalizer takes whatever you have written and attempts to rephrase and reword it into formal English, making you sound more professional and in some situations making it more likely what you have written will be taken seriously.
Judge lets you know how your writing is likely to sound to others. I tested it and was delighted by how detailed and helpful its feedback was.
Making dinner - the ultimate project management goal
For many people, study and work are one thing but what really defeats them is finding something appetising to eat when staring into a half-empty (or even fully stocked) fridge at the end of a long and tiring day and trying to work out how those things in front of you might make for an interesting and appetising dinner. Simply choose Chef, hit the speech-to-text icon (the little microphone image) and tell the app what ingredients you have and any particular requirements or constraints - perhaps that you are diabetic, vegan, and/or only have ten minutes to cook, and the app will suggest meals you could cook.