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 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: Forget the back-and-forth of finding a time everyone can make. 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.