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

What we love: How you can 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”). Templates make it a snap to add repeated sports practices, lunch meetings or book-club nights.

Quick tip: Forget the back-and-forth of finding time for multiple people to meet. When creating an event, you can offer attendees multiple meeting times by clicking Propose Another Time. Fantastical will email everyone a web link for picking the options that work for them; once everyone agrees on a time, Fantastical sends a final invite to all – and automatically adds the event to your calendar.

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.