Using Todoist As A Simple Task Management Tool

TODOIST is my web based To-Do list of choice. I have tried and used other web apps such as Remember The Milk, Ta-da list, Thinking Rock, Vitalist and many others over the past couple of years, and this is the one that I have settled on. Why do I like it so much? Todoist has a simple clean interface and it is a pleasure to use. It does what you want it to – no more, no less.

What do I want from a to-do list? I want to be able to add tasks quickly and efficiently. I want to be able to organise that list by category and/or by priority. That’s about it. I don’t want a built in calendar – I already have a perfectly fine one of them (Google Calendar) and I certainly don’t want to enter into the realms of project management – that’s unnecessarily complicated. Another important reason I don’t use dates at all with my tasks is that 9 times out of 10 we tend to be too optimistic about how long a task will take. Then we miss the deadline and the whole thing becomes depressing and disheartening, when in actuality the date that we put down was not that important anyway. If a date really is that important – then put it in your calendar!

How I used Todoist is indeed a simplified version of how the developer intended it to be used. I do not use the calendar functionality at all and nor do I use the project hierarchies. However, in light of my priorities outlined above, I have found this solution to work the best  in terms of keeping it simple and quick to use. I suggest experimenting for yourself obviously to find a model that is going to work for you.

Step One – visit www.todoist.com and register. This is quite painless. Remember to bookmark the site in your web browser to save time finding it again in the future.

Step Two -create a project and call it something like “To Do List”. To do this click on the Add Project link (see below).

Step Three - click on the preferences link at the top of the page, and copy the set-up in this illustration. Obviously, set the time and and date to suit your own location.

Step Four – adding a task. The best way to add a task is using the keyboard shortcut:  CTRL+A.  I use a PC – it will be the equivalent on a Mac. You will be presented with an input line like this:

Incidentally, if you are having problems seeing these images clearly simply click on them to see in full size.

Step Five – label the item. In the illustration above, you will see that, at the end of the task I want to add, I have added the text “@personal”. The @ sign tells Todoist that you are labelling the task – in this case I want to put it in my ‘personal’ folder. You can have as many labels as you want and you can tag each item with more than one label if you wish.

This is why I do not use different projects in Todoist – because it is much easier to organise the list using labels. You can create a label for individual projects, for work, for personal, for family etc. Try dividing the list in a logical way that suits you. One word of advice is that you can easily get carried away and use too many labels. Over time, I have found it most effective to limit the number of labels I use to 3 or 4. I have personal, work and family labels – and that’s it.

Step Six – set the item’s priority. You will also see that at the end of the task in the illustration, I have added the text !p1. Again this is code that Todoist takes to mean that this is a priority 1 task.

There are 4 levels of priority available. Over time I have based my use of them roughly on Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Priority 1 – Red – VERY URGENT!

Priority 2 – Blue – Important and timely

Priority 3 – Green – Good to do but no rush

Priority 4 – Black – Someday / Maybe. Would be good to do one day….maybe.

Step Seven – after adding your latest task to the list, press P on your keyboard. This then formats the list by priority, with the P1 tasks at the top, and the P4 tasks at the bottom. I find this to be the most effective overview of your task list. Your list may look something a bit like this:

And that, as they say, is pretty much that.

There may come a time when your list is growing quite long (as such lists tend to over time) and you may wish to see only those tasks that relate to ‘work’ for example. To do this, simply click on any of the work labels, or type @work into the search box. The screen should then look like this:

It is not possible to order this list by priority but the colour coding will make it obvious as to which tasks have which priority.

As I said, this is not the only way to use Todoist by any means and I know that many people get a lot of benefit from the hierarchical projects functionality. I guess it really depends on what you want from your task management application. For me, simplicity and ease of use are key. Your priorities may be different. The important thing is that you find out what works for you.