I’ve used a fairly wide array of productivity apps over the years. This includes AnyDo, Todoist, TickTick, Notion and several more. However, I’ve had the same gripe with all of these apps: None of them do it all. Okay, maybe that’s unfair. Notion does, but in my opinion, none of its features can hold a candle to apps that specialise in them. Recently, I’ve discovered Marvin. It’s another productivity app that claims to do exactly what I want. But is it really as good as it claims to be?
What is Marvin?
Amazing Marvin is a personal productivity app that is built to help you get more done while feeling less stressed. It actually touts itself as the most feature rich and customizable personal to-do app on the market today. That’s a bold claim! Like I mentioned earlier, I have some experience with these types of apps, so I decided to try it out to see for myself if this claim is true.
The Good
First, let’s dive into the good stuff! What makes Marvin good and what sets it apart. Here’s a round-up of some of the features that stood out to me when I first picked up Marvin.
Built on science
Marvin claims to be carefully designed using principles from behavioral psychology to help you:
- Reduce procrastination
- Feel less stressed
- Increase your productivity
They have entire pages on their website dedicated to how it all works. I’m no behavioural psychologist, but how they explain it makes sense. Marvin feels like more than just a list of tasks. It feels like an assistant that often converses with you to help you plan and prioritize work to get more done.
Customization
Okay, so they were serious when they called it to most feature rich and customizable personal to-do app. The amount of features packed into this thing is crazy. Also, the ability to toggle them on and off individually to keep your interface de-cluttered is mind-blowing.
Templates
Coming from another to-do app like Todoist or TickTick? Marvin has you sorted! Simply choose your preferred tool from the “Apps” section under Workflow templates. Doing so will set up Marvin similarly to the app you’re used to as a starting point. You’re free to use it as-is or to build on it from there.
Calendar
A big feature I feel is missing from some popular to-do apps is a calendar. Marvin comes with a pretty good calendar out of the box. It syncs two ways with both my personal Google calendar and the Outlook calendar I use for work. I personally like to track habits and Marvin lets you add them to the calendar too! This means you can see all of your tasks, habits and events from multiple sources on one convenient calendar. No need to switch apps! That’s a big plus in my book.
Goals
I’m leaving the best for last. I honestly don’t know why more personal productivity apps don’t offer a similar feature. The goals feature lets you set long-term goals and objectives and provides a way for you to tie different actions (habits, projects, tasks) together to achieve a common purpose. You can also track your progress and reflect on your goals and actions regularly by using the check-in feature. This feature makes approaching large goals so much less daunting.
The Not-So-Good
With all the above said, no app is perfect and Marvin is no exception. Below are some of the pain points that I encountered while trying out Marvin.
The mobile apps need work
For how much of a powerhouse the desktop and web-based apps of Marvin is, the mobile apps leave much to be desired. There is only a limited subset of features available on the mobile app, and it’s barely customizable in stark contrast to the desktop apps. Still, you can add tasks and view your calendar so it’s not terrible, but I’d much rather the developers focus on making it great!
On the expensive side
Your options when buying Marvin are $8/month billed yearly, $12/month billed monthly or a once-off fee of $300. Now I know there are almost no tools you can compare to Marvin like-for-like, but some other apps like TickTick and Todoist cost around $2-$4 a month. As great as Marvin is, I’m not sure I would say it offers twice the value of the other apps mentioned just yet.
Some assembly required
I mentioned earlier that the customization in Marvin is impressive. However, I think a lot of users might be overwhelmed by Marvin at first. Especially considering the target market for Marvin are procrastinators. I think there is likely a considerable overlap between “procrastinators” and people who suffer from disorders like ADHD. I for one obsess over optimizing my Marvin setup and often spend more time tweaking my tools than actually working on the tasks I should. For someone like me, a simpler tool where I can’t fiddle is probably a better option.
In Conclusion
I really like Marvin. Is it the best task manager? I think there are individuals for which that answer would be a resounding YES!
That is reason enough to try it out for yourself to see if you’re one of them.
At the same time, is it for everyone? No, I don’t think it is. However, I think Christina, Mark and their team are doing a great job and Marvin is on the right trajectory that maybe one day soon the answer to that question will be yes too.
If you do decide to give Marvin a go, let me know what your experience was like. I’d love to hear if worked out for you, and I’m sure Christina would too.
