I’m always losing track of what I have to do, and even sometimes what I want to do. I can forget because I was told to do something while being deeply focused on something, or because too much has happened between my decision to do something and the moment when I have time to do it, or any other reasons. To stop forgetting things, I’ve been using Todoist for a few weeks now, and I love it more and more. This post is to snapshot my current workflow, but also try to show some awesome features of the product.
Why Todoist?
Before Todoist, I was mainly using Google Keep, sometimes Trello. But Keep is limited, really limited. No formatting, basic checklist, no recurring task or any advanced features. And Trello, even though it’s an awesome project, I don’t like the mouse oriented interface.
There is a lot of solution available, but for my personal life, my administrative task and my personal projects, like this blog, I wanted something simple but powerful. A TODO app with nice features seemed the right choice, and since I’m a fan of Doist and its way of advocating transparency, work-life balance and everything, I wanted to try their solution first. And it was love at first sight.
The Amazing Todoist
The first contact you have with the app (mainly the web app for me, but any Todoist app gives the same effect by keeping the same design) makes you say “wow, that’s slick”. The design is simple, light, but at a glance you know you’re on Todoist. And everything is reactive, instantaneous, easy to do. The search is awesome and fast. The way the app parse your task to find project’s name, date, users & everything is awesome. And you can do almost anything using your keyboard only! I’ll just show you how nice and awesome it is:
Finally, I’m using it also to organize my life with my roommate. It’s easy to share project, assign task, comment on a task, etc. I’m not even using everything Todoist has to offer and I’m already a big fan. It’s helping me a lot in searching a new job, but I’ll write a blog post about that later.
My workflow
Every monday I try to plan my whole week, or at least select the tasks I want to be done this week. Each morning I review my tasks for the day, maybe add tasks with no schedulded day if I think I should do more, and just follow the tasks. If I think a task is too much for the day, I postpone it even before starting my day.
I try to not have a lot of projects. I have 4 main projects:
- Perso, for my personal life & goals
- Side project, for all my side projects, including this blogs
- Ideas, for any ideas I might want to develop later, like this blog was a few months ago
- Coloc, for my flatsharing organization
I made a sub project for each side project I’m currently planning to do, and try to make sure I list every task I can think of, and then subdivise those task into more and more tasks to finally get to only trivial tasks. Task hierarchy is really useful in this case.
Ideas & Coloc are juste a list of tasks (I plan on deleting both subprojects of Coloc, since there is no real upside to having those), and Perso is also only this. But there is one subproject in Perso, and I’ll try to keep it that way, always only one subproject here, that’s my main goal currently. For now, it’s to find a job. Soon it will be to find a new flat for my roommate and I. Etc. I think it’s better to focus on a single goal at a time.
We’ll see How my usage of Todoist will change over the next few months. For my next job, I’ll surely use Todoist to plan my work day too. But for now, this is my process, and I’m really happy with it.
