Intro
Todoist is a very handy tool that does a lot more than just function as a todo list.
This quick review should give you an idea of whether Todoist is worth trying out, or whether an alternative like Nozbe or Wunderlist might be a better tool for your workflow. There’s a large number of integrations and addons – this includes Gmail, Outlook, Chrome, FireFox, Evernote, and more.
For additional power you can set up IFTTT recipes for items like starring emails in Gmail to make them a note or marking a video to watch later in YouTube to make it into a todo note – but we’ll get to all that on another video, this is just meant to be a review of Todoist!
Todoist is available on a wide variety of platforms, including Android, iOS, and more.
If you’re looking for a todo productivity app, collaboration software, project management software, a powerful todo list application, task management system, or a mix of all of these, this Todoist review is one that you’ll want to watch carefully.
Video Content
Today, we’re going to be going over Todoist. This is a great productivity app that you can probably guess by the name, at least started as a to-do list type of app.
Just to get the basics out of the way, it’s available on all major platforms; Windows, Mac, Android, iOS. I’m not sure about Linux. I’m not sure that it is. I know Nozbe is. I’ll actually have to look that up and find out [Edit: after recording the video, I looked at the Todoist page and it appears there is no native Linux app: https://todoist.com/Help/Apps]. This is their page talking about the Premium, what you can get for a whole year for $29. I do that, but their free app is pretty solid too. There’s a few things you’re going to miss out on, but you can definitely check it out for free.
Let’s see. Here, it says all the platforms it’s available on. This is a good, quick overview if you go to their sales page, you can see what it’s got. You can add notes and file attachments, you can get mobile and email reminders, location alerts, that’s an interesting one. You can send an alert, and I’ll show you how to do this [edit: for location reminders, see the blog post on How To Set Up Location Based Reminders In Todoist], for … Let’s say you go to a certain street address or a store or something like that, then you get an alert. When you are in the vicinity of a grocery store, pick up these things. That type of thing.
You get automatic backups, you can check that out, labeling and filtering. You can access your tasks via iCalendar, productivity tracking, haven’t done too much with this but you can see completed tasks and that’s an upside. Obviously, being able to search through is important. You can add emails as tasks. If you do things like star a message in Gmail, you can have it added. That’s pretty handy. Then you’ve got templates and sync. It’s very quick to sync. I haven’t had any issues with that.
Let’s take a look at the inside. This is what it looks like for the web app and the mobile apps are not significantly different. This is just going to give you a good overview of what it looks like. You’ve got your Inbox and that’s what we’re in right now. You’ll also have Today. If you want to click on that, you can see what is happening today or what you have scheduled for today and then the Next 7 Days. Those are your three main boxes.
These are stock projects; Personal, Shopping, Work, Errands, Movies to watch, and then you can add projects and move these around or delete them as needed. You have your labels, which are a Premium only feature, and filters. We can see what priority you labeled them, all that type of stuff.
My personal account, I have a Premium account. I signed up for this with Productivity Academy so that I can show you what a basic account looks like and still how powerful it is. Let’s add a task. We’re going to, “Create a Todoist video”. All right. Right now, today is August 1st. Sorry, October 1st. It pops up with today’s date. In general, it’ll pop up with the date you last put in there. Barring that, it will show today’s date.
From there, you can click on it and get a drop down here to show different dates. Cycle through, you can assign it today, tomorrow, next week, in a month, or no due date. Then you can set recurring dates if you want to have something every week or every month. Something else you can do, there’s a lot of shortcuts here for using different date and time systems. For example, you could say, “Every day at 9:00 AM”, and that’s a valid instruction for a recurring event (or task). Instead, we’re just going to pick a date here for an example today. You can pick where you want it to go. By default, Inbox, but you, again, have all the projects that you have listed. Then, you can set reminders. That’s a Premium feature but that’s pretty self-explanatory. You can use your priority. Just click, “Add Task”, there we go.
We’re going to add one more so I can show something here. “Create second video”, “Add Task”. We can move these around, you can alter when they’re due, you can make edits to them, change the dates, and then if we do that, we can see that that other video went to the next day because I changed it. This gives you the basic layout. Again, this is kind of handy. Let’s say you’re going to be going shopping and you need to get a birthday present. “Buy birthday present for Bob,” and we want to do that this weekend when we have some time so we set a reminder for October 3rd, which will be the weekend. Let’s say Saturday at 3:00 PM when we’re going to have some time. Then you click, “Add Task”. Now it’s going to be set at 3:00 PM. Pretty easy to use.
Now that we have several tasks, you can go back here to your Inbox and see what that looks like. You then can go through your projects and have it filtered or you can look at the Next 7 Days and you can see even though it’s not in my Inbox, per se, I need, on Saturday, to be doing this. This is a good place to review for those of you who use something like getting things done. You do a quick review on a daily, or maybe weekly or more basis, then this is a good way to see, “This is everything I’ve got coming up for the week. This is what I need to be aware of.”
There’s also notification features (which works great with setting reminders), which you can play around with as just in your settings. You can do Todoist settings and I’ll let you take a look at that. It’s pretty handy. You can get push notifications, SMS notifications, email notifications. If you set a time for something, you can get an email reminder, for example, which is really handy.
That’s about it for a quick overview. Again, the easiest way is to get started. If you’re interested in Todoist, I highly suggest you pick it up in one of the app stores or just sign up via the web for the web app, and then maybe try it on your phone. It’s really handy, very easy to use. There’s some detailed stuff we’ll be covering later, but to get up and running, it only takes you about five minutes.
There’s some great integrations available now as well. For example, with Todoist Premium you can sync your Todoist with your Google Calendar – very helpful for having dated and timed tasks show up in your calendar. Speaking of Premium, if you’re switching to Todoist, I highly suggest you try out Premium so that you can see what all you can get out of the app before making your choice on what exact features you need.
