Todoist 2019 — My Set-up

For the past four to five years, I have been switching to all the latest and greatest task management tooling from Apple Reminders to a full fledge personal JIRA set-up. During this time, with each switch I tailored my “process” more and more, this originally started as some kind of GTD approach to evolving into some kind of Frankenstein process which is effective and allows me to exceed in everything that I do.

This post is purely focused on Todoist and this is a tool I picked up many moons ago when it had a different design language. Back then, the main motivation to switch to this tooling was the sheer availability across pretty much every platform. At the time, I was young and just starting on my GTD (link to the GTD process) journey and that was the decider why I moved away from Todoist to a tool which had a more rigid GTD approach to its tooling. The tool I am referring to is OmniFocus which is a pure Apple eco-system tool.

Fast forward a few years, Todoist changed its design language, and my approach to task management / productivity has evolved from the days of trying to focus purely on GTD.

As a side note, one of the main advantages I have seen with switching task management tooling so frequently is that it enabled me to really purge my tasks in a spring cleaning kind of approach. This really made me not fear switching so often.

Present

At this moment in time, I am fully invested in the todoist platform. The tool not only drives the daily business for me, but also completely serves as my second brain. I fully trust and rely on this tool to remind me about key appointment, tasks and opportunities which I no longer actually need to remember.

So, how do I use Todoist? The approach I take to the tooling set-up is to adapt it to function as the Eisenhower Method teaches. I like the Eisenhower Method as it better fits my own judgement and so there is no compatibility conflict with my brain compared to other well known approaches. Again this is just my personal opinion and some people might find the other approach / methods better compatible with their own brain process.

I simple apply this method by utilising the label feature in Todoist and I use at the moment no other labels apart from “urgent”, “not-urgent”, “Important” & “not-important”. Whenever I create a new task in Todoist, I give it two labels based on its urgency and importance.

What I then did was create four filters based on the four quadrants of the Eisenhower Method:

• Do (this will also include any of the below tasks which are DUE today)
• Schedule
• Delegate
• Backlog (should be delete but I think of it more of a backlog)

Here are the Todoist formulas to get the above filters in your own Todoist set-up

DO

Filter: (overdue | today) | @urgent & @important

Colour: RED

SCHEDULE

Filter: @noturgent & @important

Colour: Orange

DELEGATE

Filter: @urgent & @notimportant

Colour: Yellow

Backlog

Filter: @noturgent & @notimportant

Colour: Blue

Now, let’s look at how I work with the above approach in my day-to-day life to understand the approach.

Each day, my main goal is to clear the DO filter completely, if something appears there it MUST be done. Once the DO filter is done, I will check the SCHEDULE filter and look for all the tasks that do not have a date assigned to them, I will then either work on them or assign them a date in the future. If there is nothing in SCHEDULE which I can work on now (only because they have all been scheduled for a future date and I respect the date) I then will focus on the DELEGATE filter.

Generally, I will leave the IDEA filter for when I need some creative freedom. Sometimes you just need a break in what you’re doing and add some value somewhere else. There is no pure schedule or approach to how I handle the IDEA filter.

The above approach isn’t purely for my professional life, I apply it to my personal life also. I really believe that you should utilise the same tooling for your personal and professional life and I separate them by creating projects as the image below shows:

I make sure that both the personal and professional projects keep with the colour coding standard to make them clearly identifiable in the above filters.

I really find this simple and lightweight approach to utilising Todoist very effective and allows me to over achieve in a lot of areas in my personal and professional life.

Future

In the latter part of 2019, Doist the developers of Todoist will implement a Kanban-style approach to Todoist, this possibility opens up a lot of potential and one of the reasons why I wanted to switch to Todoist as I work with Trello when it comes to projects that I am collaborating with people on and I would love to move this to Todoist to have one tool to rule them all.