Trying to find the perfect iOS apps can be tough, and we’re willing to bet that your iPhone or iPad is full of pages and pages of apps. There’s just so much out there, it’s hard to come up with a short list of favorites. We understand. Allow us to help you with our freshly updated Lifehacker Pack for iOS.

The Lifehacker Pack is an annual snapshot of our favorite, essential applications for each of our favorite platforms. For our always-updating directory of all the best apps, be sure to bookmark our App Directory, where we profile amazing apps for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS—browser extensions, too.

FiveNotes (formerly known as Quick) is a small text editor that you can always access by clicking (or pressing shortcut keys) on its mtatus-bar icon, even if you’re working in a full-screen app. If you prefer, it can stay on top of the window so it can be used as a cheat-sheet app. FiveNotes offers exactly 5 notes that can be switched using colourful circles under the text area. The official site provides a number of links through which to add it to your browser or email client. You can also get the project's source code, hosted at GitHub, from that page.

Productivity

Email: Outlook or Gmail (free)

Yes, you can still use Mail, and it works reasonably well for most people’s basic email needs. As an alternative, we recommend checking out Microsoft’s Outlook (free) or Google’s Gmail (free), as both are great for managing multiple email accounts from different providers in a single, easy-to-use interface. Outlook comes with a bonus calendar built-in, as well as a special “Focused Inbox” feature that attempts to help you prioritize your out-of-control inbox and snoozing tools for bumping important emails back to the top of your queue. With more than 700,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.7 stars, to say Microsoft’s email app is pretty well-liked by its users is a bit of an understatement.

Google’s Gmail app is a perfect fit if you’re already bought into Google’s ecosystem, though it also makes it easy to connect up email accounts from other providers and manage your many messages at once. If you need a little help deciding which emails to tackle first, check out Google’s other email app, Inbox by Gmail(free).

If you don’t like either, there are plenty of other email apps worth investigating: Spark (free, though its data collection practices have made some users unhappy); Airmail (free, the iOS version of our Mac email app pick); Astro (free, comes with a free virtual helper called “Astrobot” to help you deal with your inbox); Edison (free, an email client with lots of positive reviews and a useful “unsub” feature for ditching newsletters you don’t want).

Calendar: Fantastical 2 ($5)

It might feel a little bit silly to pay $5 for a new calendar app when the one baked into your iPhone or iPad works fine for everyday use. I was surprised—but not that surprised—to find Fantastical 2 recommended over, and over, and over, by other users and other websites. It’s a must-have calendar app, even given its meager cost. The app’s interface looks great and makes it easy to see what’s on your schedule (or what’s coming up), featuring useful little dots to give you an at-a-glance indication of how busy you might be on any particular day. You can even pull iCloud reminders directly into your calendar, to make sure you don’t miss anything important coming up.

The app also does a great job helping you create events by just how seamless it makes it to use natural language to create new calendar items: “Taco Bell on Thursday at six p.m.,” for example. Even if you don’t have a lot of events to enter on your calendar, Fantastical 2 is the best for getting them scheduled and viewing them (and everything else you have to do) in a number of different ways. I’ve frequently seen this app referred to as an app Apple should have made instead of Calendar. It’s that good.

Other contenders I considered included Google Calendar, which is both easy-to-use and free, as well as Calendars 5 ($7, featuring a lovely looking interface that does an admirable job of packing in as many appointments as possible without forcing you to scroll), Timepage (free, which gives you a calendar whose dates get darker as your day gets busier), and Rooster (free, an app that focuses a bit more on giving you a comprehensive look at your daily schedule and tasks than a traditional calendar app).

Notes / To-Do: Bear (free-ish)

There are way too many notes and task management apps on the App Store. Way. Too. Many. We, and many others, are big fans of Bear (freemium; $15/annual)—pricey as it is—because it’s a gorgeous app for both note-taking and tracking to-dos. It synchronizes effortlessly with its Mac version, as any good task-management app should, and both its automatic and manual tagging ensures you won’t miss any critical on your various lists (one hopes).

Bear’s search function is speedy and comprehensive; the actual process of creating notes is nearly effortless (and supports inline images); and you can even write up your tasks in Markdown if you want to get fancy. Tagging is as easy as adding a hashtag before any word in a note, and linking between notes to provide additional context for an item is an incredibly useful feature. You can export your notes in a variety of different formats, if you want, and you can even doodle your notes directly on your iPhone or iPad’s screen.

If you don’t want to pay to prevent forgetfulness from overtaking your life, you have plenty of other good options for tracking your tasks and writing little notes to yourself. Microsoft’s OneNote (free) is a great cross-platform app for dealing with everything from sketches to writing, whereas its To-Do app (free) is better for basic reminders. Google Keep or Tasks (free) are both strong choices, with the former good for notes of all formats and the latter ideal for simple text. Simplenote (free) also supports Markdown-based notes and is completely cross-platform.

Other paid apps we considered included Notability ($10), a highly reviewed app that’s great for those who prefer to handwrite notes and annotate documents. Todoist ($36/annual) is an excellent cross-platform task-management app that we love on the Mac, and its premium features (like automatic reminders and an activity overview) are useful, but super-expensive. Due ($5) has a great concept: It nags you to death until you finish something you’re putting off on your to-do list.

Automation: Workflow (free, but disappearing soon) or IFTTT (free)

Before Apple goes and replaces its Workflow (free) app with Shortcuts, download it and check it out. It’s completely free to use and provides a great introduction toward automation: the art of having one thing do multiple things instead of having to do those multiple things manually. For example. using Workflow, you can use Workflow to automatically resize images to certain dimensions or convert them into a specific file format (like a .GIF). Or you can create a little button that automatically searches for the nearest gas station and pulls up directions—a useful little trick when you’re driving. You’re only limited by your imagination. Well, that, and the confines of the app.

IFTTT (free) allows you to create similar kinds of rules for a ton of supported devices and services. I’ve covered some fun things you can do with the app and service previously and, like Workflow, you can really get yourself lost with all the neat things you can do. My favorite trick? It’s a toss-up between “turn my room fan on and off when I connect and disconnect from my wifi” and “send all @ mentions on Twitter to a Slack channel so I don’t have to keep pulling up the website when I’m trying to work.”

Storage: Google One, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Drive, or Dropbox (various)

We’ve covered all the major cloud services. Odds are good you have a favorite (or two, or many) that you use, and odds are just as high that sai

Markdown-based Email Client For Mac