Bottom Line: Sorted³ is the rare productivity app with a genuine point of view — that your tasks and your calendar belong in the same timeline — and it executes that idea with some of the best gesture design on iOS. If you live inside Apple's ecosystem and your to-do list keeps losing fights with your calendar, this is the app to buy.
The Case for Hyper-Scheduling
Most task managers are optimistic fictions. You write down fourteen things, complete four, and roll ten forward in a quiet ritual of self-deception. Sorted³ refuses to participate. By forcing every task to confront the actual hours available, it converts your to-do list from an aspiration into a contract. The Auto-Schedule button is where this philosophy becomes tangible: tap it, and the app threads your tasks through the gaps in your calendar, assigning each one a start time and duration. The plan it produces is frequently humbling. You wanted to do fourteen things; the timeline says you have room for six. That friction is the product working as intended.
The obvious objection to minute-by-minute planning is that reality doesn't cooperate. A call runs over, a kid gets sick, and your beautiful schedule is rubble by 10:40 a.m. This is where most time-blocking apps quietly die — the cost of replanning exceeds the value of the plan. Sorted³'s genuine innovation is that it optimized for the replan, not the plan. Magic Select lets you swipe across five slipped tasks and shove them to tomorrow in one motion. The Time Ruler lets you grab the back half of your day and slide it forward forty minutes, durations and sequence intact. These gestures aren't demos; they're load-bearing. They're what make hyper-scheduling survivable for humans with actual lives.
Interface
The gesture system deserves specific praise because gesture-driven apps usually fail in one of two ways: either the gestures are undiscoverable, or they collide with the system's own. Sorted³ mostly threads this needle. Magic Select's diagonal swipe feels physical, like dragging a highlighter across paper, and the Time Ruler's drag interaction has the satisfying directness of moving a fader on a mixing board. There's real onboarding friction here, though — the first week involves accidental selections and some head-scratching, and users coming from a plain list app will need to unlearn habits. The app teaches its vocabulary reasonably well, but this is not software you fully understand in five minutes.
The weak spot is duration visualization. Competitors like Structured render a 90-minute task as a proportionally tall block, so a glance tells you where your day is dense. Sorted³'s timeline is more list-like, and reviewers are right to ding it: durations exist as data but don't always land as shape. For an app whose entire premise is making time tangible, that's an odd blind spot, and it's the most legitimate criticism in the App Store reviews.
The other structural annoyance is pricing mechanics rather than pricing itself. The PRO unlock is purchased separately on iOS and macOS — $14.99 plus $24.99 if you want the full experience everywhere. A combined ~$40 one-time is still cheaper than a single year of most rivals' subscriptions, but the double-dip stings on principle, and StaySorted doesn't surface it clearly enough up front.
The Free Tier Is Actually Free
Credit where due: the free version is a real product, not a nagware trial. Core scheduling, the unified timeline, and the essential gestures work without paying. PRO adds the power features, but you can live in this app for weeks before deciding whether to commit money. In 2026, that restraint is almost quaint.