Top 7 'North-Star-Navigating' Productivity Apps to install for connecting daily tasks to your big goals in 2025 - Goh Ling Yong
Ever feel like you're on a hamster wheel of productivity? You're checking off tasks, clearing your inbox, and attending meetings, but at the end of the week, you can't shake the feeling that you're just... busy. You're moving, but are you moving in the right direction? This disconnect between daily effort and long-term ambition is one of the biggest silent killers of dreams. We get lost in the weeds of the urgent, forgetting the vast, important landscape of our goals.
The problem isn't a lack of effort; it's a lack of connection. Your daily to-do list should be a series of deliberate steps on a path leading directly to your "North Star"—that big, audacious goal that guides your life or career. Whether it's launching a business, mastering a new skill, or writing a novel, every small task should feel like you're laying another stone on that path. Without that connection, your tasks become a random collection of chores, and your energy gets scattered to the wind.
But how do you build that bridge between a Tuesday morning task and a 2025 vision? This is where technology, when used intentionally, becomes your greatest ally. We're not just talking about another digital checklist. We're talking about powerful systems designed to help you zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to execute the daily details. For 2025, let's ditch the busywork and embrace strategic action. Here are the top seven "North-Star-Navigating" productivity apps that will help you connect every single task to your most important goals.
1. Notion: The Custom-Built Life OS
If you’ve ever wished you could build your own productivity app from the ground up, Notion is your dream come true. It’s less of a single-purpose tool and more of a box of digital LEGOs. You can build anything from a simple task list to a complex, interconnected operating system for your entire life, complete with databases, wikis, and project trackers.
The magic of Notion for North Star navigation lies in its ability to create relational databases. Imagine having a high-level database for your "2025 Goals." Each goal (e.g., "Become Fluent in Spanish") is an entry. You can then create another database for "Quarterly Projects" and link each project (e.g., "Q1: Complete Pimsleur Level 1") directly to its parent goal. Then, you can link daily tasks to those projects. Suddenly, when you're looking at your task for today—"Practice Spanish verbs for 20 minutes"—you can see the direct, visible thread connecting it all the way up to your North Star.
Pro-Tip: Start with a simple "Goals," "Projects," and "Tasks" database structure. Use Notion's "Rollup" and "Relation" properties to pull information between them. For instance, you can create a dashboard view that shows what percentage of tasks for a specific project are complete, automatically updating the progress bar on your main goal. It’s a powerful visual motivator that confirms your daily grind is paying off.
2. Asana: The Collaborative Goal Setter
While often seen as a tool for corporate teams, Asana's power for individual goal-setting is seriously underrated. Its true strength lies in its structured, top-down approach. Asana was built with the hierarchy of work in mind, making it a natural fit for breaking down massive ambitions into manageable pieces.
Asana’s "Goals" feature is the game-changer here. You can set a high-level company or personal goal (your North Star), and then link specific "Projects" to it. Each project contains the tasks required to move the needle. The platform visualizes your progress, showing you exactly how the completion of daily tasks contributes to the overall goal. This clear, cascading structure prevents you from ever wondering, "Why am I even doing this?" The answer is always just a click away.
Pro-Tip: Use the "Portfolio" view to group related projects under a single theme or goal. For example, create a "Health & Fitness 2025" portfolio. Inside, you can have projects like "Marathon Training," "Meal Prep Routine," and "Weekly Yoga." This allows you to see your progress across an entire area of your life at a glance, making it easier to stay balanced and motivated.
3. Sunsama: The Intentional Day Weaver
If apps like Notion and Asana feel like building a strategic command center, Sunsama is your daily briefing room. Its core philosophy is about mindful, intentional work. It's not just a place to dump your tasks; it's a ritual that forces you to plan your day with your larger objectives in mind. Here at the Goh Ling Yong blog, we often talk about the power of intention, and Sunsama bakes it right into its workflow.
Each morning, Sunsama guides you through a planning session. It asks you to define your "Weekly Objectives" first. Then, as you pull tasks from your backlog (or from integrated apps like Asana, Trello, or Gmail) into your plan for the day, you consciously decide which objective each task supports. This simple act of daily alignment is incredibly powerful. It ensures that your time and energy—your most valuable resources—are being spent on what truly matters.
Pro-Tip: Use the "Timeboxing" feature religiously. When you plan your day in Sunsama, drag your tasks directly onto your calendar to block out focus time. This transforms a floating to-do list into a concrete plan of action. At the end of the day, the "Shutdown" ritual helps you review what you accomplished and consciously disconnect, preventing burnout and preparing you for another day of focused work.
4. Todoist: The Quick-Capture Powerhouse
Sometimes, the biggest barrier to progress is friction. Todoist excels at removing it. With its natural language input ("Schedule team meeting every Tuesday at 10 am #Work") and availability on virtually every platform, it's the undisputed king of quickly capturing tasks before they vanish from your mind. But its simplicity hides a surprisingly robust system for goal alignment.
The key to connecting tasks to your North Star in Todoist is a smart use of "Projects" and "Labels." You can structure your projects in a goal-oriented hierarchy. For example, have a parent project called "Launch Podcast in 2025." Nested underneath could be sub-projects like "Episode Ideation," "Recording & Editing," and "Marketing." Then, use labels like @high-impact or @goal-focused to filter for the tasks that will make the biggest difference each day.
Pro-Tip: Create a custom "Filter" view that acts as your main dashboard. You could create a filter named "Today's North Star Tasks" that shows you all tasks that are due today AND are part of your main goal-oriented projects. This cuts through the noise of daily errands and puts your most important work front and center every time you open the app.
5. ClickUp: The All-in-One Command Center
For the power user who wants every feature under one roof, there's ClickUp. It aims to be the "everything app," combining tasks, docs, goals, whiteboards, and more into a single, highly customizable platform. Its sheer number of features can be daunting, but for those willing to tame it, ClickUp offers an unparalleled ability to link work to objectives.
Like Asana, ClickUp has a dedicated "Goals" feature. You can set a goal, define measurable "Targets" (e.g., save $5,000, write 20,000 words), and then link specific tasks or task lists directly to those targets. As you complete the linked tasks, ClickUp automatically updates your progress. Where it shines is its customizability. You can view your goals and their related tasks in a list, on a Kanban board, on a calendar, or even as a Gantt chart, catering to whatever visualization style works best for you.
Pro-Tip: Use ClickUp's "Custom Fields" to add a "Goal Alignment" score to your tasks. Create a dropdown field with options like "High," "Medium," and "Low." During your weekly review, you can quickly sort your tasks by this field to ensure you're prioritizing the work that offers the highest leverage for your big-picture ambitions.
6. Things 3: The Designer's Delight
If you're in the Apple ecosystem and value clean design, focus, and quiet efficiency, Things 3 is in a class of its own. It doesn't have the complex databases of Notion or the team features of Asana, but it masterfully guides you through a clear and logical workflow for connecting long-term goals to daily actions. As I've found personally, an aesthetically pleasing and frictionless tool can significantly boost your desire to engage with it daily.
The structure in Things 3 is simple and elegant. You use "Areas" for your high-level life categories and goals (e.g., "Finances," "Career," "Health"). Within each Area, you create "Projects" with defined outcomes (e.g., "Save for a House Deposit"). Each project is then filled with the "To-Dos" needed to complete it. The "Today" view is the star of the show, pulling in tasks you've scheduled for the day, creating a clean, focused list that feels manageable, not overwhelming.
Pro-Tip: Use the "When" feature to schedule tasks not just for a specific day, but for "This Evening" or "Someday." For your big goals, create a "Someday" project within the relevant Area. Fill it with all the ideas and steps you might want to take. During your weekly review, pull one or two of these tasks out of "Someday" and schedule them for the upcoming week, turning vague ambitions into actionable steps.
7. Akiflow: The Universal Inbox & Time-Blocker
Is your to-do list scattered across Slack messages, emails, Trello cards, and your notes app? Akiflow is built to solve this modern problem. It acts as a universal inbox, consolidating your tasks from dozens of other applications into one central command center. Its superpower, however, is helping you schedule those tasks and fiercely protect your time for what matters.
The North Star connection here is all about execution. A goal is useless without dedicated time to work on it. Akiflow makes this process seamless. After setting up your goal-related projects in an app like Asana or Todoist, you can pull those specific tasks into Akiflow and, with a simple drag-and-drop, block out time in your calendar to get them done. This "capture and schedule" workflow ensures that your most important work isn't just on a list; it's on your calendar, treated with the same importance as a meeting with your boss.
Pro-Tip: Use the "Rituals" feature to automate your planning. Set up a daily ritual that prompts you to review your high-priority tasks (which you can tag as #goal) and schedule them for the day. Create a weekly ritual to review your upcoming week, ensuring you've carved out enough deep work blocks for your most significant projects. Akiflow bridges the gap between knowing what to do and actually making time to do it.
Your Compass is Set. Now, Take the First Step.
Choosing the right tool is like choosing the right pair of hiking boots for a long journey. The perfect pair for someone else might not be the right fit for you. The most important thing isn't which of these apps you choose, but the intention you bring to using it. The goal is to build a system that consistently, and almost automatically, reminds you of your "Why."
For 2025, let's make a pact to stop measuring our days by how many tasks we've crossed off and start measuring them by how much closer we've moved toward our North Star. Pick one of these apps, dedicate a weekend to setting it up with your biggest goals in mind, and commit to the daily or weekly ritual of connecting your actions to your ambitions.
Now, I want to hear from you. Which of these apps resonates with your style of working? Or do you have another favorite tool for navigating by your North Star? Share your thoughts in the comments below—let's build a community of intentional achievers together
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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