Fantastical is an elegant and superpowered app that can quickly organise your sea of calendars and appointments – and make sure you never miss a meeting, lunch or yoga session again.

What we love: Using natural language to add single events (“Dinner with Aaron at 8pm”) or recurring ones (“Date night every first Friday of the month”). Booked events link directly from their confirmation emails, and handy templates make it a snap to add repeated sports training sessions, lunch meetings or book club nights.

What we love: How easy it is to fill out your calendar. Enter events as you would say them (“Dinner with Aaron at 8pm”) – and just as easily set up recurring plans (“Date night every first Friday of the month”). Forward emails to your dedicated Fantastical address and the app automatically extracts and adds the event or task details. Templates make it a snap to add repeated sports practices, lunch meetings or book-club nights.

Quick tip: When you create an event, tap Show More and Propose Another Date to add a few options. Fantastical will email each invitee a link where they can pick the times that work for them. The app will then send an official invite to everyone and add the event to your calendar.

Meet the creator: Founded by Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland in 2011, Flexibits creates award-winning productivity apps for Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch. And speaking of awards, Fantastical was named our 2020 Mac App of the Year.

Meet the creator: Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland founded Flexbits to make productivity more pleasant and fun. Their two apps, Fantastical and the contact manager Cardhop, are powered by a natural-language parser that turns plain language into actions.