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Recently, the team at Todoist have released some web extensions to further increase the functionality of their task management application. One of the best ones is, for me, the Habit Tracker.
Todoist can now convert a recurring task into a habit and let’s you build streaks as you complete them. It’s fool-proof, and very easy to implement so I created a short video showing you how to do it.
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As the number of projects and tasks that you have in Todoist - or any task manager for that matter - grows, you need a way of being able to get those actions that are relevant, at the time they are relevant.
Let’s paint a picture. It’s 11 am - you’ve been working well for an hour, building up a solid sense of momentum. Your brain is in the zone, the minutes are flying by and you check your to-do list to see what can be done.
You see a task named File Invoices for September. Pretty menial in nature and certainly doesn’t make the most of the energy levels that you currently have. Yet it’s the next task on the list, so you complete it.
That’s a shame.
In an hours time, you’re starting to feel that pre-lunch slowdown. The brain is a little tired now, you’ve been working for a while, and you look at the next task. Mind Map Ideas For a New Marketing Strategy
The lizard part of your brain automatically starts to resist this, because you’re a little tired. Such a shame you didn’t look at this an hour ago when you could have attacked it with a sense of purpose. Now, one of two things will happen. You may start it, and make a pretty weak attempt at it, or it will get deferred until a later date - stained with the fact that you’ve already turned it down once.
This is just one example where the assignment of labels to your Todoist tasks can help filter out the stuff you can’t do, with the stuff you can, or should.
If energy-based labels were assigned to those tasks, a filter could be created that just shows you what is available to you if you have either high or low energy levels - which both makes your time incredibly efficient and helps to avoid the overwhelm and disappointment that comes with looking at tasks you just cannot physically do.
Being able to slice and dice your Todoist projects with these labels can really help you go to the next level with your productivity. Below are some more examples that you can use - but there is no limit or right/wrong method for using labels. Like all things productivity-related, it’s incredibly personal and you should use whatever labels work for you
If you are at home, is there any point whatsoever in looking at tasks that can only be done at the office? No. Unless you are planning out tasks for another day or carrying out either a daily or weekly review, these tasks will only distract you and take your mind away from the actions that you can carry out.
Location labels are great for any physical location, so could be different shops or stores, sites that you visit for work, anywhere that you run errands, even different locations in your house if you have a very regimented cleaning regime!
Also, if you are either still commuting or getting back into the commuting lifestyle, you may want to have the bus or train as a label - really useful if you have headphones on and can actually sit and focus, without being disturbed by colleagues.
Lots of tasks can be done on multiple platforms, however, I like to assign labels based on which device is best and most appropriate for the task at hand. I could send invoices on either my Mac, iPad OR iPhone - but it’s clunky on the phone and takes me longer on the iPad, so I will only assign it a label of Mac.
Conversely, I can check all of my social media contacts on any of those devices - however when I’m sitting at my Mac, I feel like I should be doing something far more productive, so I assign that task two labels - iPad or iPhone because it’s fine on both.
Tech labels can stretch further than hardware - what about software as well? If you are in Slack or Teams for example and have a list of actions you need to carry out whilst you are in these apps, wouldn’t it be great to pull up a list in Todoist that itemises these for you? No reason why you can’t. Just do it. There will be job-specific applications that are a lot more bespoke to your role that you may want to include in this as well.
Lots of options for tech labels
We all have those people in our day to day lives, both personal and professional, that we are reliant on. Sometimes, we need information from them, other times, we are waiting on tasks and actions.
Having people labels in your Todoist list is great during meetings as one example. It can be difficult to get hold of people when we are working remotely, so tapping someone’s label in Todoist will present you with a list of things you want to ask, or follow up on, and believe me, this makes you look hyper-efficient!
At home, I have labels for my wife and daughters. They mean the world to me and when I’m at home, I don’t want to miss out on anything important. My wife’s label forms part of a filter that I have to look at every day and there are always things I need to do for the girls to keep them happy and healthy.
I love these. Generally, they go hand-in-hand with the people labels specified earlier because you can assign more than one label to a task, however, if you create Filters that combine a Waiting For a label with the label for an individual, you will only see items that you need to specifically follow up on, rather than just stuff you want to ask. This method of fine-tuning your labels and filters will have a great effect.
The Agenda label is very similar however as well as pairing it with a person’s label, you could use it to identify things that need to be discussed at a particular upcoming meeting. You may have a recurring meeting that is set up as a project in Todoist. Using the Agenda label means that you can assign it to tasks within that project to form your agenda. Or you may wish to go further and create agenda labels for separate meetings - like agenda agm, agenda daily huddle or agenda weekly meeting.
So tasks take longer than others, naturally. If you have 15 minutes to spare and pull up Todoist to look at what you can check off, is there any point in looking at tasks that will take longer than half an hour?
Why not have labels like @15mins, @5mins, @30mins and so on? Then you can make the most of those small gaps in the day that you get. Conversely, if you know you are sitting at your desk for 90 minutes, you can look at a longer form task and make the most of the time you are there.
Do remember though, if you are looking at tasks that have a long period of time, you should think about breaking them down. If I have something that’s looking like it will take longer than an hour, I know I need to finesse it to make it more manageable.
Whilst Todoist has four great priority flags, this may not be enough for some people. It all depends on how you have your Todoist infrastructure set up because you may use those flags for a different reason altogether.
If you were working on a methodology like the Eisenhower Matrix then you want to have labels for Important and Urgent rather than using the built-in flags.
These are just a few of the labels that you can have with Todoist but there are so many options out there for you. Try not to go too mad with them - if you flood your tasks with labels, they may lose their effectiveness. It’s important to start slow and build yourself up to a level that is manageable.
Feel free to check out my Taster course on Todoist that will get you started in 30 minutes.
The full course is available here and is updated with new content monthly!
If you would like to join the MyProductiveMac-ademy, then sign up here and you’ll be notified as new content is rolled out.
It really doesn’t seem that long ago that I was a workflow guest at Tim Stringer’s awesome Learn OmniFocus. I remember the planning beforehand, the worry, wanting to ensure that I was able to convey exactly how I used OmniFocus.
Turns out, that was in late 2017 - and here I am, in October 2021, using a different task manager. And to such an extent, that I’ve released a video course on how to use it. That’s quite a change.
Do I have a problem with OmniFocus? Let me go on record by saying absolutely not. It’s a great task manager and if you are 100% solidly in the Mac eco-system, I would never turn around and say you should use Todoist instead of it. That’s not because one is any better than the other, it’s just because I find these task managers have to be suited to the way you work as an individual. There are also elements of OmniFocus that I wish were present in Todoist - defer dates being one. You cannot defer a task into the future to make it disappear from view in the same way you can with OmniFocus. It is of course, possible with Filters to a degree but there is a lot of messing around you have to carry out to get to that point.
Also, the Focus and Review modes in OmniFocus are worth their weight in gold. I love being able to key in a shortcut and just see one project in a new tab and hide everything else - and being able to Review projects at individual intervals with a simple keystroke really fits in with the Getting Things Done methodology.
That said, there are elements of Todoist that fit in better with my own personal workflow and way of working.
Interface on Mobile - I’m finding myself grabbing for my phone or iPad more often to check off tasks that need to be done around the house and the Todoist interface on these platforms is, in my opinion at any rate, easier to navigate. The syncing is instantaneous which I put down to Todoist being a web service at heart. Quite often with OmniFocus I’d pick up my phone, wait for thirty seconds for the syncing to complete before I see the actual list of actions that I can crack on with.
Todoist also has great swipe actions on mobile, making it easy to postpone actions for a later date - not quite the same as deferring, but when you get into how Todoist works with Due dates, it works well.
Cross-platform support - In my Project Management world, I can find myself having to use a client device to ensure I can connect to their shared services. One benefit of the pandemic means this doesn’t have to happen as often with remote teams and collaboration being ubiquitous. However it does happen and whilst I could add information to OmniFocus on my iPad or through the web browser, that’s not how I like to work. If I’m on a Windows machine, I need to access a fully functional task manager because if I’m going to use something, I want to use it to its full potential. With Todoist having a solid Windows application as well as an awesome web service, this was a no-brainer. I started using it for a particular client and eventually threw everything into it.
With hooks into Amazon Alexa, Fantastical, Zapier, Momentum and more, there is a clear advantage to having a web service fulfil this function. Yes, I know there are disadvantages to that as well - but they are outweighed by the good stuff for me.
My Output - I hate myself for saying this because when I deliver Productivity Coaching, I always use the mantra ‘It’s about the Approach, not the App’
And I stand by that. An application is not going to make you more productive. The approach to using it will. Put the right information in, touch it regularly, ensure you review what’s in there, break tasks down, yada yada yada. If you’re reading this, you know all this. So why is it when I use Todoist, I find myself ticking off lots more tasks? It’s not the Karma functionality that’s built-in to it which rewards you for checking off tasks and using Todoist. I’d rather check off two really important, lengthy pieces of work than ten smaller ones. Fact is, I don’t know and I’m still reviewing this.
I think it’s because there is more of a reliance on assigning due dates for repeating tasks. In OmniFocus, they would have defer dates that would repeat every day, week, whatever is needed. Todoist doesn’t understand defer dates - instead, I have to provide them with due dates and they scream at me in my Today view, even if they are not ACTUALLY due on that date. I don’t HAVE to carry out my Clean My Mac maintenance on my Mac mini today for example - but if I don’t have it set up with a due date, it cannot repeat. This is a big shift for me because I always used to put in due dates for tasks when they absolutely, positively, had to be done on that date. Now, I’m a little freer with them. The downside is it can dilute other more important tasks. The upside is that with four priority levels in Todoist, you can mitigate this by assigning varying levels of priority to these - and I do ensure they get done. With just a defer date in OmniFocus, I didn’t have the onus to do it. Again, that’s all about the approach. I could have used due dates in OmniFocus - I just didn’t because I thought it was wrong.
Perhaps I was
So there we are. In a nutshell, that’s why I’ve moved across. It started as an experiment and has now stuck.
If you would like to try Todoist to see how it is, then check it here.
To purchase the Todoist Course, click here
It’s been a long time coming, however finally taken the plunge and decided that it would be a good idea to launch my own online course. I’m hoping this is the first of many as the MyProductiveMac-ademy finally goes live
The first course I’ve developed is the MyProductiveMac Guide to Todoist and is 60+ videos covering everything from Getting Started with the application, all the way through to configuring integrations and looking at examples of different workflows.
There is going to be new content posted to the site monthly which is why I’m confident that the introductory price of £29.99 + VAT represents good value.
If you are looking at either getting to grips with Todoist, or developing your existing skills, then check the course out - it may be just what you are looking for