Todoist: My Current Toy for Tasks

Speaking of toys, one of my latest favorite toys is the task manager Todoist. At work we had project management software and I made a point to route most of my day through that, but all my personal notes, todos, reminders and whatnot have been through Todoist since August. Now that I’m flying solo, I’m putting all my freelancing tasks through Todoist as well and it’s been amazing.

What to look for in a Todo app

The only thing I care about in a todo app is “what does the app assume I care about?” Productivity apps almost always work better when you follow their system instead of trying to force your system upon them. So when I started considering Todoist what really sold me was a particular blog post from the company’s founder in 2016, “Systemist: A modern productivity workflow“. The post outlines how Todoist assumptions basically start with the classic Getting Things Done (GTD) methods but let’s all admit to ourselves that some of the GTD decision tree is just in the way. What Todoist assumes I want is to capture tasks and thoughts into my inbox really quickly, from everywhere you’d expect to get tasks and thoughts. From there it assumes I want nicely filtered views while I’m in action mode so I can concentrate on only the tasks I want to work on. On these two fronts I’ve been able to more rapidly adopt Todoist than any other task application I’ve used in the past.

Quick add even quicker

Many features and integrations make it easy to add tasks. Perhaps most importantly they don’t feel like additional tools to learn, they’re just part of the system.

• The quick-add toolbar feels a lot like Alfred workflows, but even better
• The natural language syntax for projects, labels, and reminders doesn’t have to be taught, it just happens
• Todoist for GMail and Todoist for Chrome are really stable and make adding emails or webpages as tasks really fast

Between those three options, I already was capturing more tasks than I normally would.

Endorsement

I wholeheartedly endorse Todoist if you’re in the market for a todo application. However,going into it you should really think of it as a $30/yr application not a freemium application. The free version is great for giving you a feel for how it works, but I really cannot imagine trying to tame a monkey brain without the premium features. Labels, reminders, and comments are really all essential.

Questions

I’ve been avoiding opening comments on my blog posts, but in this case I’m kind of interested to know if any of my friends use Todoist and what they think about and I’m also open to questions on how I use it. So comments are open!

Referral

If you purchase Todoist Premium and use my referral link I get 2 extra months of premium, which I love. Thanks in advance for the click: https://todoist.com/r/alex_xiwmok