Keep On Top Of Your To-Do List With Todoist

This week I’d like to share with you a tool I have been using for a long time to organise my workload – Todoist. I had been looking for my perfect to-do list tool for a while before I settled on this one, and I’ve found it really useful for keeping track of all my tasks, so perhaps you will find it useful, too.

Todoist allows you to manage your projects, and the tasks within those projects. You can set due dates, prioritise tasks, and also schedule recurring tasks, which is particularly useful. Let’s take a closer look:

Projects and Tasks

A project might be just what it says on the tin for you – such as a website redesign, a marketing campaign or a product launch. For me, my clients are my projects.

Then, within those projects you can create tasks – for example, proofread new website content, mock up homepage design, write blog post. Tasks can have a due date (but they don’t have to), and a priority (more on that below). You can tick off tasks to make them disappear when they’re done, or postpone them to another day.

You can also set recurring tasks by typing something like “every day” or “every Monday” into the title of your task – the software will detect this as you type, so that you can easily set recurring tasks. You can also set a due date easily in the same way. When you set a due date for a task, a calendar pops up and hovering over a date tells you how many tasks you have due on that day. This is really useful for spreading out your work.

Views

The interface allows you to see all the tasks you have due today or over the next seven days. You can also use filters to see all tasks that have a certain priority or that are assigned to you. Or you can click on a project to see all of the tasks associated with it.

Priorities

How you use Todoist is up to you, and you’ll probably have your own system in your head for using it. For example, there are four priorities, which are colour coded – red, orange, yellow, and white. I use red for tasks that must be completed on that day, such as sending reports. Yellow for me is when I need someone else’s input in order to complete a task – for example if I have sent a document to someone else and I am awaiting their feedback before I take the next steps. Orange is pretty much everything else – tasks that I need to do myself, but that aren’t urgent. I don’t use the white priority colour.

Productivity

You can see a little chart of your productivity, which shows you how many tasks you have completed each day for the last week, and your productivity trend. It also tells you your current daily streak for completing your daily goal (I have a daily goal of completing five tasks, which I think was set by Todoist) and your longest streak (mine is 8 days).

Premium Features

There are a few premium features, such as putting labels on your tasks to batch them together. You can also add tasks via email, see more productivity tracking and charts, and set reminders in the form of emails and push notifications. There is also a Todoist Business plan, which is geared towards people using the software as a team.

For me, the free version does just what I need it to do, and I find it far easier than flipping through the pages of my notebook to find out what was on my to-do list last week. Everything I need to do gets put into Todoist, helping me to keep track of everything, organise my workload, and complete tasks. For more insights into how we juggle our work at a busy digital agency, check out Marc’s blog post about time tracking tool toggl.