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This new productivity app will give your life the color coded order it’s been missing
Amie wants to be more than a calendar and to-do list—it wants to ‘design your life.’
The new productivity app Amie started with an unusual question: What would Google Maps look like if it was designed not to take you from New York to Boston, but to take you from knowing nothing about music to playing the saxophone?
While this thought exercise might seem silly, it’s how Amie’s founder Dennis Müller identified a gap in existing productivity apps. He saw plenty of calendars, to-do lists, and scheduling programs on the market, but very few that combined those functions to serve as a road map for achieving goals—like learning how to play an instrument. So Müller spent four years creating Amie, an all-in-one platform for “designing your life.” Today, Amie is launching to the public with a new feature that lets Google users sync their email account with the app.
Amie combines a full calendar, to-do list, and email server. Beyond these core functions, the app also hosts unique integrations with other services like Notion, Zoom, and Spotify.
“You can look back and see exactly what you were listening to at 9 a.m. [on any given day],” Müller says. “Even though that was more for the giggles, people really resonated with it, and it’s become one of the favorite features that we’ve ever done.”
Following the success of the Spotify integration, Amie debuted a new collaboration with Apple Health that lets Apple Watch wearers keep a daily diary of their sleep habits and exercise routine, and even track how their heart rate fluctuates throughout the day (and during stressful meetings). Despite the app’s ever-expanding catalog of features, Müller says one of his team’s top priorities is maintaining a simple, friendly design. Each individual can personalize their experience on Amie by maximizing the features that they need the most. If a user just wants to see their calendar, for example, they can simply collapse the to-do list and email functions. According to Müller, Amie’s customizable design is the result of countless rounds of real-world testing and feedback from consumers.
“Our strategy boils down to something very simple, which is that, most often, we’ve redone everything 10 times with little to no respect for deadlines,” Müller says. “We know that nothing we do will succeed on the first try.”
Continuously building out Amie’s offerings is an ongoing process of imagining “everything that a calendar could be” for Müller. His team is currently working on a number of add-on prototypes, including tools that would let users draw directly on their calendars, habit-tracking software for business professionals, and new integrations. And while Müller acknowledges that designing your life on a calendar doesn’t always mean your ideas will come to fruition, he does believe that there’s power in making a plan.
“Just because you put in a run tomorrow doesn’t mean that you will always do it—that’s not how the world works,” Müller says. “But if it increases the odds by 20 percent, it’s quite significant to me.”