For example, if you set a task and type every 1st Tuesday of the month, Todoist will know to schedule it repeatedly on the 1st Tuesday of every month from that day forward. What recurring instructions can you shorten? You can use natural language in long or short format to instruct Todoist. Heya gang, I'm trying to setup timecard reminders for my team and 'every! Last workday of the month at 0600' works really well. Now I'm trying to duplicate that, but for the mid month time cards due on the 15th. The ability to really focus on tasks in Todoist isn’t limited to Project or Labels views. Initially, new users spend their time working in Projects and then slowly start adding Labels to the mix, allowing themselves to work with Labels as a trigger. Once you’ve become a seasoned user, you realize that switching back and.

It’s not a secret, especially if you listen to the MakeWorkWork podcast, that I am an avid to-do list maker.

I use one task list app (Todoist) to run almost everything in my life. I recently reflected on how I keep my tasks organized and realized that there are several specific things I do to stay organized that I can pass along to anyone, regardless of the to-do list platform that they use. (Sad to report that these might be slightly less relevant if you are using pen and paper, though.) Here they are:

View only work tasks during the workday

Like I mentioned, I use Todoist for every part of my life: grocery lists, work tasks, podcast work, anything that comes up. I even used Todoist to plan my wedding. But during the workday, I don’t want to see all of the tasks I need to work on outside of work, I just want to focus on my work tasks that are due that day.

The way Todoist is set up, they have a few premade views that you can toggle through. One of them is tasks due today, and another is tasks due in the next 7 days.

Neither of those work if you don’t want to be distracted by tasks that aren’t related to work, which is the case for me.

Luckily, Todoist has filters so you can create custom filters depending on how you want to view your tasks. I set up two simple filters:

• Tasks for work that are due today; and
• Tasks for work that are due tomorrow

If you also use Todoist, here’s their post on filters so you can create your own.

Prioritize, for real

Another feature is the ability within Todoist to flag tasks as priority one, two, or three. While I could flag multiple tasks as priority one, that wouldn’t really help me decide what I need to work on first.

So, I use Todoist’s system every day to rank my top three priorities in order of importance, and then that’s the order I work on them in.

Usually, I try to tackle my most difficult task first, also known as ‘eat the frog’ from Mark Twain.

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”

That doesn’t always work out and sometimes I need to tackle a different task because something more urgent comes up, but on days when I can choose to start with the most difficult task from my list.

Tag everything, everything has a place

Most task lists will have a way to organize and tag tasks into categories or projects. Todoist uses the word projects for the different groups of tasks. While a project sounds short-term to me, I’ve organized my tasks into categories of life: work, personal, side projects.

It took me a while to land on this system. I used to create new categories as new work projects popped up and at one point had a really busy project list.

I’ve since reverted to try and get this list as minimal as possible both because that’s easier for me to remember and it’s nicer to look at when I’m glancing at my task list.

In Todoist, one feature that they have is called sections. So, within a project you can create sections that don’t create new projects. It’s just a way to organize tasks within a project. That’s been great for me making all of my lists more simple.

For example, I used to take all of the items I added to get at stores and separate them into different projects depending on the store. Now, I can just move them around in sections without needing to change the projects.

Automate what I can

The reason I use an app instead of pen and paper is that I can set reminders and automate things I want to happen weekly. This saves me a lot of time and it’s so reassuring that I’m not forgetting anything.

One of the things I have automated is recurring tasks. I have several tasks set to recur after I’ve completed them and on specific days. A few examples:

• I have a weekly 1:1 with my boss. An hour before our call, I have a reminder pop up to fill out our 1:1 doc ahead of time.
• I gather all of the Buffer media mentions weekly, I have a reminder set up to do this task every Monday.

Another thing I’ve automated is that I’ve connected the Amazon Echo’s around my house to a specific Todoist list because we use the Echo’s to add grocery items. So all of my grocery items get added to Todoist as well and I always have them on me.

Those are the core principles I use to stay organized. I’d love to see a photo of how your to-do list is organized! Subscribe to my newsletter if you’d like more content like this. :)

The secret to using a task management system is to make it an everyday habit. My task manager of choice is Todoist and I put virtually everything I want to get done into it: work stuff, side projects, home repair tasks, kids’ school stuff, whatever. It all goes into Todoist, and I’m dipping in and out of that app to check off tasks and add new ones, every day, many, many times a day.

Creating new tasks quickly and easily is key, of course. I use virtually all of the many methods that Todoist offers for adding tasks, from Quick Add on my desktop (essential) to voice dictating tasks into Google Assistant (less essential). I’ve also created an iOS shortcut called “Todoist Task from Webpage” that has become an essential part of my productivity. I’m making it publicly available today and you can download it here for free and install it on your iPhone or iPad.

I made this shortcut because so many of the tasks I create in Todoist each day are based on what I come across in my web browser. On any given web page, I might find that I want to follow up on it at a later time, download something linked on the page, make a purchase, watch a video, or something similar. In fact, it used to be that a lot of the tabs I’d keep open in my browser were actually tasks in disguise: I’d want to keep them available so that I could take some action on them later. Obviously it’s more useful to turn these into tasks than to let them linger as tabs for days or weeks.

The key to translating a page you’re looking at into a task that you’ll actually take action on is quickly capturing the page’s URL. You can do this manually in Todoist by either adding the link as a comment on a task or, even better, embedding the link into the text of the task itself in Markdown form. This is straightforward, but of course the more quickly and easily you can create a task the better.

When you run this shortcut on iPhone or iPad by selecting it from the share menu in mobile Safari (sorry, Chrome on iOS doesn’t support the Shortcuts actions that make this possible) it grabs the URL and the title of the page and quickly formats them as a Markdown link. You can then choose from a list of actions with which to prepend that link, e.g., “Read,” “Follow up on,” “Purchase,” etc. to form the text of the new task. Another menu allows you to assign the task to one of your pre-existing Todoist projects, and the due date is automatically set as today. That’s it; with a few clicks, the page has been turned into a Todoist task.

Here’s what it looks like on an iPad:

Todoist Every Workday Download

Some other nifty details of this shortcut:

Todoist Schedule

• Tasks are assigned a due date of today unless you’re running the shortcut after 9:00p local time, in which case it automatically assigns the next day as the due date.
• Turning a link on YouTube.com into a task is a little trickier, so the shortcut actually makes a quick call to the YouTube API to get the information necessary to create a new task. As a result, you can also use this shortcut from the the YouTube app. Tap on the share icon and then swipe over to the More action to find the shortcut.
• In some cases where the preset actions don’t quite make sense to prepend to the page title, there’s a custom option to allow you to fully edit the text of the task on the fly.

I use this shortcut every day, multiple times a day, and it’s become an essential part of how I think about task management. I now stash all kinds of pages into tasks, from Adobe XD web prototypes that I want to review later, to YouTube videos that I come across during the workday, to Kickstarter campaigns I want to consider funding, and much more. If you’re using Todoist (and if you’re not, you should be) give this a try and let me know what you think.

Recurring Task In Todoist

This shortcut requires iOS or iPadOS 14.4 and the latest version of the Todoist app for iPhone or iPad. Note that if you’ve never run third-party shortcuts before, you’ll need to follow these steps. Also check out ExactPic my suite of image editing shortcuts