Free to-do list app: type a task in one sentence, get it organized

Daniel Gavalec · Updated October 13, 2026

CORTEX is a free to-do list app with no ads where you type a task as one plain sentence – Call dentist friday @9 ~15m !high – and it fills in the date, time, duration and priority for you. Tasks are grouped automatically into Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, This week and Later, can repeat on almost any schedule, and pay out XP and credits when you finish them. This page covers the full quick-capture syntax, how to keep a list you actually finish, and what the app deliberately does not do.

Quick capture: the syntax cheat sheet

The fastest to-do list is the one you can add to without breaking your train of thought. Press Q anywhere in CORTEX (or tap the floating lightning button on your phone), type the task and add any of these tokens. Order does not matter; whatever is not a token becomes the task title.

A few real examples and what they turn into:

• Send proposal to Corner Café tomorrow @10:00 ~30m !p1 #clients → critical, tomorrow 10:00, 30 minutes, under the goal "clients".
• Pay rent *monthly 28.10. !! → high priority, due October 28, repeats every month.
• Read chapter 4 for history class thu ~45m → due Thursday, 45-minute estimate.
• Water plants *weekly sun ~5m → every Sunday, 5 minutes.
• Idea: podcast about indie games → no tokens, so it goes straight to the Inbox to sort later.

Inbox first, organize later

Tasks without a goal land in the Inbox: a holding area for things you captured fast. Once or twice a day, go through it and for each item either assign it to a goal and give it a date, or delete it. This is the "capture, then clarify" step from David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it is what stops a to-do list from turning into a guilt list.

Capturing is not just tidiness. In experiments by Masicampo and Baumeister (2011), making a concrete plan for an unfinished goal reduced how much it intruded on people’s thoughts during other work. Writing the task down – with a date – is the cheap version of that plan.

A useful rule: if a task in the Inbox takes under two minutes, do it now instead of filing it.

How the list organizes itself

In the Planner you never sort by hand to see what matters today. Tasks are grouped by their deadline:

• Overdue – missed deadlines float to the top, so nothing quietly rots.
• Today and Tomorrow – the working set.
• This week and Later – planned, but out of your face.
• No date – someday items and ideas.
• Done – the trophy shelf.

Inside a group you can change the order with the up and down arrows, snooze a task to push it later, or start its timer straight from the row. The header shows how many tasks are on today’s list and how many hours they add up to – the single most useful number for avoiding overloaded days.

app.getcortex.online/planner

Everything a task can hold

Quick capture covers the basics. Open a task to fill in the rest:

Estimate vs. actual: the underrated feature

Each row shows something like 25 / 60 min: time already tracked on the task against your estimate. People underestimate how long their own tasks take – psychologists call it the planning fallacy (Buehler, Griffin & Ross, 1994). After two weeks of seeing your real numbers, your estimates get honest and your days stop overflowing. If you consistently need 1.5× your estimate, simply multiply before you plan.

How to keep a to-do list you actually finish

The app is only half of it. These rules make any list work, paper or digital (there is also a printable to-do list template):

1. Start every task with a verb. "Email Sara about the deadline", not "Sara".
2. Cap today at what fits. Add up the estimates; if they exceed your free hours, move tasks before the day starts, not at 9 pm.
3. Sort by impact, not urgency. If everything feels urgent, run the list through the Eisenhower Matrix once and delete or delegate the bottom quadrant.
4. Pick one "prime directive". The Today screen has a slot for the single task that makes the day a win. Do it first.
5. Split anything over two hours into subtasks.
6. Review weekly. Delete what no longer matters. A shorter list is a more honest list.

app.getcortex.online/today

Stuck on starting at all? Read how to stop procrastinating, or let Plan My Day put each task on a clock.

A free to-do list app for students

Students get the most out of three things: recurring tasks for weekly assignments (*weekly), estimates so a "quick essay" does not eat the whole evening, and the focus timer for study sessions in 25 or 50-minute blocks. Create one goal per course – "Biology final", "Spanish B1" – and every finished task moves that course’s progress bar.

The game layer helps here too: each finished task earns XP and credits, and you can price your own rewards – an episode of a show for 100 credits, a night out for 500. It is free for everyone, with no ads and no student verification. Pair it with the free Pomodoro timer if you study in a different browser tab.

Honest limits

CORTEX is a personal task manager with a game layer, not a project-management suite. Before you move your whole life in, know what it does not do:

• No Kanban board and no drag and drop inside the task list (you reorder with arrows; drag and drop works in the calendar week grid).
• No sync with Google Calendar, Outlook or iCal.
• No imports from Todoist, TickTick or other apps.
• No team workspaces – collaboration is limited to shared goals and alliances.
• No native App Store or Google Play app – it installs from the browser as a PWA.

If you need boards and integrations, a classic task manager is the better tool; see Todoist alternatives for a comparison. If you want a list that is fast to fill and rewarding to empty, CORTEX is built for that.

Todoist, TickTick, Google Calendar and Outlook are trademarks of their respective owners. CORTEX is not affiliated with them.