Make your Todoist task - This is where the magic happens imho. You will now see the familiar Todoist task entry screen with all of its regular functions like assigning projects, labels, due dates, priority, etc., with Todoist's awesome natural language processing. Quick-Add Tasks Finally, this is my favorite feature of Todoist: it’s intuitive and fast. If I type “Reflections, #school, @high-energy, p1, due every Mon and Wed at 9 am” Todoist takes care of adding it to the correct project, labeling it correctly, marking it as priority 1, scheduling it by date, time, and repetition. Be Kind to Yourself.
2021-01-09 16:51:24
My productivity system was out of whack for a while. Like everyone else it seems, I was migrating everything to Notion, including my tasks. I would also put more insignificant tasks and grocery lists in Drafts. As I kept trying to work through this, I realized that it was too much for me to keep track of. My brain was all over the place. I wasn’t organized, and it stressed me out because I felt like I wasn’t productive. So I stopped trying that and decided I would just double down on Todoist, but first–my setup needed a serious revamp.
I started to rebuild in November 2020. During this process I was still using Todoist, I just wasn’t enjoying it. I basically wasn’t even completing tasks unless they were ones that notified me. It felt overwhelming and old. Although Boards were introduced in September, I hadn’t updated any of my projects to use them. At work we started using boards in Asana more and more; and I liked that, so I decided my they should play a big part in my personal setup too.
In my first Todoist post, I had sooo many projects. Honestly, way too many. I also had labels that I put on every task that just ended up cluttering up the screen and filters that I never used. Everything worked for a while, but then I started hating it, so I went the opposite route. I consolidated projects into sections using Headers and had a handful of projects. The sections were okay, but I think I really just used them because they were there. They didn’t add anything to my workflow. This restructuring was where I began to lose interest in Todoist. I was too lazy to fix it, but it was too much for me to want to.
Don’t get me wrong. I did enjoy using Todoist. I’ve tried several task management solutions, and I’ve always come back here; I just let my setup get out of hand. It was too much. I started rethinking how I wanted to handle tasks and how my brain likes to organize. In the past I tried forcing myself to organize in ways I knew wouldn’t work for me and in ways I wouldn’t take advantage of, but this time I was honest with myself. I asked myself, “Are you really going to keep it up if you do it this way?”
The solution was obviously to take the middle road, right? That’s what I decided. I concluded my brain HATED the unnecessary amount of sections but liked seeing more Projects. And because Boards require the use of Sections, I reorganized some of my existing Projects that have actionable tasks to be the ones that took advantage of this relatively new feature. They are also the ones that have to do with some kind of work or degree of completion.
All Projects that use Boards have 3 Sections to denote task status: Not Started, In Progress, and Completed. This status simplicity really helps to motivate me. Boards allows dragging tasks between columns, and I find that this small difference is more satisfying than clicking the checkbox. For my own task management, I find the little things (Rule #32) really help my general outlook towards everything I have to do.
I now have no Labels and only 2 Filters. I created these 2 because I use them in 2 of my Todoist Widgets in iOS 14. One just displays Overdue items. The other displays only Today’s tasks. I liked the separation of these because even though I may have finished Today’s tasks, I don’t want to forget what’s overdue from Yesterday or days before. This works vice versa. It’s a good reminder for myself when I want to just quickly glance at my phone to see what else I need to do.
I added Emoji to the beginning of each Project and each Section to add a little visual fun like I’ve seen done by others. I think that’s big for me to have it looking nice and sort of funny so that it’s not too “worky.” What it says to me is, “Yes you have tasks, but you’ll have a good time looking at how many you have.”
For quick tasks I would jot down in Drafts, I now put in my Inbox. In my old system I never put anything in my Inbox. I always thought it was a triage for tasks to categorize them later; but I thought to myself just categorize everything out the gate because the natural language processing makes it so easy. However, I now use Inbox as this quick task spot for tasks I don’t deem worthy enough of a Project.
Export Todoist Tasks
My groceries also live in Todoist now; and what’s even better is that Sarah uses Todoist too, and we can have shared lists! It works great for us. I really like the categories we have because it helps navigating shopping a little easier when it’s already not one of my favorite things to do. The ability to drag items and Sections around to reorder is really nice too instead of cutting and pasting everything like I was doing before.
I think I’ve really found a sweet spot with this setup for myself. I’ve been using Todoist so much again, and more than that, actually enjoying it and not feeling dread. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I recommend taking a step back and really assess your productivity system to see if anything can be improved. Just make sure you’re real with yourself so your new system will continue to work for you.
Updated at: 2021-01-09 17:30:22
Read More Fromproductivity
Be warned: mention Todoist in conversation and everyone will hear to do list. Maybe it means I mumble. Maybe it means that people hear what they expect to hear. Maybe it means all the good names have been taken and app names are becoming more contrived. Maybe I am over-thinking this.
Todoist is quite a decent browser-based task management app and the basic version is free. Its user interface is reminiscent of GQueues: clean, simple and colourful, with a list of projects on the left and a task list in the centre of the page. The app is easy to use and can be set up to work with a getting things done® workflow. There are mobile versions for the iPhone and iPad.
Entering and sorting tasks in Todoist used to be irksome: you had to click on the ‘add task’ button, click on the ‘save’ button and then on the ‘I’m done adding tasks’ button. Re-arranging the order of tasks in a project used to be similarly cumbersome. A recent update has simplified these processes and introduced interesting new features, so you may want to give this simple but powerful app another chance.
The main building blocks of Todoist are projects and tasks. The screenshot below shows the project view.
You can enter tasks manually or email them to a project. The subject line of your email message becomes a task; the content a note. There are also browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Todoist can sort tasks by name, date or priority. You can also use drag and drop to reorder tasks manually. You can assign your tasks a priority, a reminder, or multiple notes. One of the best features of Todoist is the use of labels, which enable you to manage GTD® features such as contexts (@boss), moods (low energy) or duration (15 mins). Clicking on the ‘@’ symbol underneath the search box brings up a list of all your labels. Todoist has a great search function and supports queries using multiple labels. For example, the query ‘q: today, overdue @boss’ will list all tasks that are overdue or due today and involve your boss. A useful career damage control device, no?
Some functions, including reminders, notes, email and calendar integration are available in the premium version only. At $29 per year, the premium version also provides productivity stats — essentially a series of bar charts showing how many tasks you completed each day over the past week. Four additional bars show the weekly total for the past four weeks. The bars are colour-coded by project, so you can see at a glance whether you have been focusing on one or two projects over the past week or whether your effort has been more diffused.
View Completed Tasks Todoist
Todoist’s seven-day view, with productivity stats displayed.
I started using Todoist at work as a replacement for ToodleDo, which had started behaving erratically after three years of solid service. I really liked the uncluttered and colourful interface of Todoist, its seven-day view and its productivity tracker. Todoist was fun to use and equal to the task of managing several complex projects. On the downside, I experienced some errors with recurrent tasks (in an otherwise very stable app) and I also do not like how all subtasks remain visible until the parent task has been completed. It would be great if that was an option that could be toggled off in settings. [Correction: I have since discovered that shift-clicking will send a subtask to history; see developer’s comment below].
Todoist will give you:
- a solid tasks management app with a clean user interface
- effective use of colour to flag projects, labels and priorities
- support for a GTD® workflow (inbox, projects, labels, project and task indentation)
- great today and seven-day views
- a range of keyboard shortcuts
- compatibility with older browsers
- portability: browser version, free mobile versions for iPhone and iPad and a desktop version (Mac only)
- reminders, notes, email/calendar integration (premium version only)
- capacity to track productivity over the past week/month (premium version only).
Points to consider:
- does not support team collaboration (they have a separate app for that: Wedoist)
- occasional errors with task recurrence.
I am preparing a post on what are, in my view, the ten best browser-based task management apps for individual use (rather than team collaboration), and Todoist will certainly figure in that list. Apart from Omnifocus, GQueues, Producteev and ToodleDo not all that many productivity apps support nested tasks. Todoist complements that feature, which is so important for project management, with effective colour-coding, multiple tags, fast searches and a user-friendly interface.
Please leave a comment if you have used Todoist. What were your impressions? And if you are a GTD® adept, do you use the productivity stats feature to inform your weekly review?
Update (09-08-2014): Asana and Todoist compared.