How to Organize Your To-Dos with Todoist (Tutorial)

If you want to use Todoist to organize your life here's how to do it. The very first thing we're gonna start with is creating some top level projects and we're gonna do that as different areas of your life. Think of your life as having different areas. One of them might be admin and finances. We all have admin stuff to deal with, bookkeeping and money stuff. So any to-dos related to that are gonna go in here. Now another one is fun and trips. Maybe some events you're planning, trips you're organ

izing, to-dos related to that, they live here. Now we all have physical and mental health stuff to deal with. We all have home or housekeeping tasks. Most of us have work tasks but this could also be studies for you, for example. And let's create one called relationships for tasks related to other people, your family and friends. Maybe something like help your wife with something, could go in here. So we've got these top level projects and I'm gonna call them areas. Now let's add some tasks to t

hem. That's, of course, the whole point of using an app like Todoist, right? How do you add tasks? Let's say we wanna add a task to admin and finances. You can just click add task right here and say send invoices to bookkeeper and add the task like this. But there's other ways to add tasks. I can use the keyboard shortcut A so just press the letter A on my keyboard and that creates a new task at the bottom of the list. I can also go shift+A and it creates the task at the top of the list. All rig

ht, so let's say scan documents on my desk might be another one. Boom. Now if I have Todoist open, you'll see right now it says Todoist at the top. I have Todoist open, I can press Q. And if I press Q, I bring up quick add Q for quick add and I can add tasks this way. Now, if I was looking at a specific list it already pre-selects this list or this project to assign the task to, okay? So let's say we have another one right here and that is to organize previously scanned documents. And let's say

I wanna do that today. One of the really cool things about Todoist is it has natural language recognition. So I can literally just type today and you'll see that it gets this colored background and that means Todoist recognizes that I wanna do this today and it assigned a due date of today. Now, in Todoist, a quick aside, there's only one type of date. It's called the due date. I want you to think of this not as the due date or deadline but as the date that you're planning to do this. If there's

a hard deadline, keep track of it in some other way. For example, writing in the description, hard deadline March 25th or something like that. Okay, now let's add this task and we'll see this task sitting right here. Now you can also pull up quick add without having Todoist open. So let's say I'm clicking here and I have Apple Notes open, for example, you see Todoist is no longer the app at the front. I can go Control + Command + A, on Windows it might be a slightly different command, and I can

say email mark the report, for example, tomorrow recognizes tomorrow. And I can go hashtag work and it will recognize that I wanna put this in the high level area, top level project work, then I click add task. And now if I go to work, I'll see that the task is in there. So it's very handy. Let's say you're on a Zoom call and you have some tasks, you can pull up this quick add thing on top of whatever you're doing and just add those tasks to to-do list and using natural language already assign

them to a specific day or a specific project. Now, let's say that I have the actual PDF and I wanna attach it. I just click on the task, I click on comment, and then I can click right here and attach a file. I can also attach a voice recording if I want to, some audio. Okay, pretty cool. Now, I also want you to not just add individual tasks but to add your projects. Let me give you an example, right now, I'm running a live course. It's four weeks where I get on Zoom with a bunch of people, we ha

ve about 33 students, and I'm helping them organize their life. So this course is called Organize Your Life. So I create a new project for it, Organize Your Life live course and I'm doing this because there's a bunch of tasks related to this course and I don't wanna put them all under work. It would just get messy. I want to create a bit more organization, so I create a sub-project under work. Let's add some tasks to it. Create the week four slides, create the week four workbook, send students a

post-course feedback survey. Those are some things I might have, okay, that I need to do. Take a group photo on Zoom is another one that I'd like to do. Oka, now I can create sections. If I go here, you see add section and I can create one called week four, for example, and I can create another one called after the course finishes. And then I can drag these tasks right in there, you see? So now I'm adding a little bit more organization just to help me get a feel of what I'm gonna do in which ph

ase. Now, let's say that I wanna work on these two things today. You'll notice that I have been adding a bunch of tasks to Todoist but I haven't just been adding them all either to the inbox or today. 'Cause I want you to think very deliberately, very consciously about what you're gonna work on today. Don't think of your to-do app as everything goes under today and let's see what you get to. I want you to make a very conscious plan for what you're gonna work on each day. And we'll talk more abou

t that sort of towards the end of the video, all right? But let's say I wanna do this today. Then I can actually just click this button right here and just go today and let's say I wanna do the week four workbook as well today. Let's say I wanna do this one on March 25th, I'll just type March 25th, boom. All right, now those are scheduled for those dates, so that's pretty cool. And under today you'll see that these two are listed right here. All right. Next, let's set up some repeating tasks and

projects. Right now I'm traveling and I'm staying in hotels and I wanna make sure that I leave a tip for the housekeepers every day 'cause they're working so, so, so hard. They do such a good job cleaning my room all the time. Now, let's use quick add and I'm gonna say leave a tip for housekeeping and I'm just gonna say every day. And what that does is you'll see there's an instance for today, but you see there's this little repeating sign, it's gonna create a new task every day. And I'm gonna

assign this to the home area. So now if I go at task, you see under home it says leave a tip for housekeeping, and it already created one for today. You can come up with all kinds of things you need to do every day. Take your pills, do some journaling, you got this. So another thing I wanna do is create a task right here. Let's do it under admin and finances. We could also think of it as work doesn't matter and I'm gonna call it do weekly review. This is extremely important. Now you see the to-d

os here recognizes weekly using natural language recognition. I'm gonna click on it, that unrecognizes it, okay? 'Cause we're gonna set this up manually. Let's go into this task and add some sub-tasks. Process email inbox, process Todoist inbox, make sure all Todoist tasks and projects are up to date, see which hard deadlines are coming up, which hard deadlines and events are coming up, and schedule tasks ahead of time if necessary so. Weekly review is an extremely important part of being organi

zed and productive, all right? So I really want you to do this every week. Now I'm gonna go in here and say every Sunday. Every Sunday, and Todoist is gonna recognize this. If I click save, you'll see this is due Sunday, but it has this repetition thing and it's gonna create a new instance of this every Sunday. Let's go to the upcoming view. And we can see, for example, if I click today, this is what I've scheduled for today, for tomorrow, and if I keep scrolling, you'll see for Sunday we have a

weekly review with all the sub-tasks and you get a new one every Sunday. So this is pretty cool, right? Now what happens when you have a project or a task or a task with sub-tasks and you do it repeatedly but not on a set schedule. For example, for me that's recording these YouTube videos. I do this frequently, but not on a set schedule. Now to do that, we're gonna set up some templates. So let's create another high level area and call it templates. Technically it's a project, right? I like to

keep it at the bottom, all the way at the bottom. And in here I'm going to add a task and says, create a YouTube video. Let's come up with some sub-tasks for this. So by clicking into it, and we'll do prepare outline, prepare recording, setup, and record the video, edit the video, upload the video to YouTube. If I want to, I can create multiple levels of sub-tasks so I can prepare recording setup and I can create more sub-tasks like set up the microphone, set up the camera, set up the lights. Al

l right, so now we got this template right here. That's pretty cool, right? And whenever I want to record a YouTube video, I can duplicate it, so I can right click it, and duplicate it and move it to my work area. But I'm gonna create actually a separate high level project called YouTube and I'll show you why even though it's still work, okay? Right here, no, that should be here. Alphabet, Peter, alphabet, there we go. So I'm gonna create this duplicate one and drag it into YouTube and let's ren

ame it and let's say YouTube 102, how to organize your to-dos with Todoist. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click right here and change the view of this project. You can do this on a project by project basis. And I'm gonna say layout board. And now we have a kanban board. So I can add sections like idea. Let's say this was an idea, okay? But I can also add one that says writing and filming and editing. And maybe we can come up with some more. But you get the point. And so what I'm gonna do

is I'm gonna say right now I'm actually filming this so I can put this under filming and just kind of get a sense if I have multiple videos going on at the same time, what is the status of each of these? And of course I've done these two things and I'm currently recording like this. Pretty neat, right? Okay, next up I wanna show you how to connect Todoist to your calendar. So for this, let's go to Todoist on the web. One of the cool features about Todoist is it's available on the web in your br

owser. And we're gonna click here and then we're gonna click for, oh, new version available. There we go. Just refresh that for a second. Sometimes you gotta do that. And then we're gonna click settings. Now, this does require, by the way, that you have the pro version, a lot of these things I'm showing you require the pro version of Todoist, so make sure you have that. I'm gonna go to integrations and right here I'm going to connect Todoist to Google calendar, okay? So right here I'm gonna clic

k add calendar and you might have to give it permissions. If this is the first time you do it, you might have to give it some permissions to access your Google calendar. And you'll see the screen where you have a bunch of options. Just leave it like this, click connect. Now after you've given it all the appropriate permissions, what you can do is go to your Google calendar, and you'll see there's a new calendar called Todoist that has been created. Let's make it red because Todoist is red. And w

hat you'll see is that the tasks that you have scheduled for specific days show up as all day events right here in Google Calendar. That's pretty neat, right? But we can do something better. Let's say, let's go back to Todoist. Let's go to today. Let's say I want to create the week four slides at maybe 2:00 PM today. What I can just do is say today 2:00 PM and then click save. And now it's assigned today 2:00 PM and you'll see that right here. Now, if I go back to Google Chrome and Google Calend

ar, oh, the task is scheduled for 2:00 PM. That's pretty neat, right? So this is one way that you can time block. We'll talk more about that later in the video. And you can move this around, if you want this to be at 3:00 PM, you can move it around, and that'll synchronize with Todoist as well. So that's really, really cool. Now, let me show you something else. See, it's 3:00 PM now. I use a calendar app called Fantastical. It's only available on Apple devices but it has a really good integratio

n with Todoist, so I wanna show you how it works. Let's open Fantastical right here. Again, we're looking at my schedule for today and for this week and I'm gonna go to settings. And then I will go to, by the way, first you wanna make sure that if you're also using Google Calendar, that you turn off that new Todoist calendar so you don't see things twice. Then we're gonna go to accounts and we're gonna click plus and we're gonna click Todoist. Now you're gonna, again, have to make sure that you

authorize Todoist to access Fantastical, all right? So I've done that right here. Now what can I do? I can go into calendars, that's where that is calendars. There we go. And if you scroll down, you're gonna see Todoist, just check all of these except for templates, all of them except for templates, all right? Now what you'll see is, hey, my tasks for today are showing up under my schedule for today in the sidebar as well as here. These are my tasks for today. And any tasks that have a time atta

ched to them are also gonna show up here. And again, I can drag this around if I wanna do this later and that'll reflect to Todoist, so it's a two-way synchronization as well. Very neat, right? So you have one view where in an integrated way you can see both your to-dos and your scheduled events all in one place. And, of course, I can check that off right here. If this is something that I've done, organized previously scanned documents, I can check that off. And if I go back to Todoist, you'll s

ee that that task, boop, it disappears 'cause I've completed it. Okay, a couple more things I wanna show you. Let's go over to filters and labels. Labels are like tags. I'm gonna call them tags honestly because it makes much more sense. Let's create a label or tag called someday. We're gonna apply this to tasks that are things that we'd like to do sometime in the future but we don't necessarily wanna constantly see them. Okay, let's say I wanna plan a trip to Iceland. I'm going to use the @ symb

ol and then type someday and then click this. You can also click it right here and then go add task. Now we have a trip, plan a trip to Iceland to-do with a someday label or tag. Okay? And you can apply this to any to-do, let's say, let's use this quite aggressively. Let's say anything that you're fairly sure you will not get to in the next two weeks, anything that you're fairly sure you will not get to in the next two weeks, apply that someday tag, let me show you why. We're also gonna set up a

filter called anytime. This filter is gonna help you plan your days. So let's go to filters. And by the way, let's click the heart symbol. What that does is creates this favorite section right here, where someday will live, just an easy access to it. We're also gonna create a filter, we're gonna call it anytime. Now just give it this query. I know this looks a little bit complicated. What we're telling it is, hey, show me all of my tasks except for the sub-tasks and except for stuff in template

s and except for stuff that has the someday filter or label, all tasks that are either already assigned to today or that don't have a date in the future assigned yet. Okay, this sounds complicated, but let's add it. And let's go to filters and labels and let's give it a heart so it lives under favorites. Now what I see here is here I see all of my tasks that make sense for me to work on today 'cause I haven't already said there for a specific date in the future or therefore someday. And they're

not templates, okay? So if I'm planning my day these are the things I can consider doing today, right? That's what this view is for. And we'll talk more about planning your day in just a minute. Before we do I just want to give you a couple extra tips about making sure Todoist is available on all of your devices. Todoist is available pretty much anywhere. Your phone, tablet, computer browser, set up widgets on your phone as well. And I just wanna show you the Google Chrome extension that's prett

y neat if you do use Google Chrome. Let's go over here, close this one. There's a Todoist for Chrome extension. So let me just add that to my Chrome. And what we can do with this, this is very dope. Let's say right here you're looking at my website, at my course called Big Picture Productivity and you're like, I should enroll in Peter's course. You can go find your Todoist extension, so right here, and you can click on, it takes a second to open. And then you can click add website as task. And w

hat that does is it creates a task with a link to the website. So you can say enroll in Peter Akkies's course Big Picture Productivity, let's say that is a we can create a learning area for that actually, let's create a learning area for that. So now, okay, boom. Now it sits in my Todoist. It got added to the inbox and also on to today because we said it as today. But let's create a new high level project area called learning or studying if you want, whatever you wanna call it. Oh, whoops, right

there. And let's drag that in there. And now this is something that you can do today or you can design it to some other day, okay? And this is a link. So if I click this, it again opens my website. Very cool, right? So here's another example. Let's say you're looking at this page that has Todoist with keyboard shortcuts and you wanna learn how to use 'em, click it in Chrome, add website as task, and say learn Todoist keyboard shortcuts. And maybe we don't wanna do that today but we wanna point

it under learning. Boom, there we go, back to Todoist, under learning we've got this other task. So that's really handy. All right, so make sure you set up Todoist on all of your devices and install the Chrome extension if you use Chrome. Now, the final thing I wanna talk about is how to plan your day into Todoist. You've basically got three options. They all involve. Let's remove all of these from today just so we're starting from scratch, okay? I want you to start from scratch every single day

. Don't roll over tasks. It's the best way to feel bad. Repeating tasks are an exception or tasks that were previously scheduled for today, that you deliberately previously scheduled for today. Those are an exception, but start with mostly a blank slate. Three options. We're gonna go to the anytime view and we're gonna pick some tasks to work on today. Let's say I want to create the week four slides today. So I'm just gonna say today and the week four workbook, remember we're looking at the anyt

ime view. By the way, you can go here view and just say group by project. That might help 'cause now things are grouped by project, okay? Let's say you wanna enroll in my course today. That's something that you wanna do and you wanna scan the documents on your desk, send the invoices to the bookkeeper, okay? Don't go overboard. Have a really manageable to-do list. Now this is your to-do list for today and now this is where the three options come in. The first one is just sort these in the order

that you plan to do them. So let's say you wanna leave your tip for housekeeping first and then you want to create the slides, do your hard work. That's what I want to do. And send the invoices to your bookkeeper, scan documents, and enroll in my course later in the day. Okay? Then you just start working through them. You can assign these to times if you want but you don't have to. Now, that's option one. Option two is sort your tasks by priority. Todoist has a built-in priority feature. And so

here's how that works. If I click a task, I can give this a priority by default it's priority four but I can say this is priority one, two, or three. So creating slides for my course, that sounds like a high priority thing. So I can do priority one. And creating the workbook is also a high priority thing priority two. Now let's say after doing that, the most important thing actually is to enroll in Peter's course. I can give it priority three and maybe or was it, no, priority two. And then maybe

this is sort of priority three and this is also priority three and I'll leave the other one on priority four. This is another way to do it. And you'll see that Todoist automatically floats top priority things to the top of the list. So that can be very handy to help and it also color codes them. I'm colorblind myself. So color coding for me is not as useful as it is for most people. But hey, this works pretty well. Just think carefully when you do this. If you find that a lot of your stuff is P

-four or the lowest category of importance, it's like why do you have all of those tasks in your task manager if they're not very important, right? And so something like, leave a tip for housekeeping, I'm going to do that today, so I can assign it the lowest priority, but I'm going to do it either way 'cause I want to. So you can do this, but be careful, think carefully about why you're assigning something a certain importance and don't delude yourself into thinking that some things are unimport

ant even though you really, really want to do. All right, final option is to time block. So the way that to do that is if I just go remove some of those priority things. Oh, you gotta set it to priority four. And I want to do that because when you start combining these things, it gets a little bit mess, alright? So I try not to combine all of these, try to pick one way of planning your day, and now I can just add time. So I can say, for example, you know what, I want to do this today at 2:00 PM

and I wanna do this next thing today at 4:00 PM and let's say that I want to send the invoices at 5:00 PM, you know you can plan your day like that. And then of course if you go to your calendar, you're gonna start seeing that these things are scheduled on your calendar, okay? So I hope you found this useful. If you want to learn more about task management or about productivity and the small sense of the word and the big sense of the word, there's three things I'd like you to do. One of them is

give this video a like, that'd be really appreciated and encourages me to make more videos. Second thing is subscribe to the channel. So you're gonna see my new videos coming up and the third thing is check out my website for example, my course Big Picture Productivity that I was just showing you. That's all about achieving your big goals, translating your goals into action. Thanks so much for watching. Really appreciate you being here. Have a great day and see you in the next one. Chow.