The true goal of productivity is to get your most important shit done. It’s about completing the tasks that drive value to your projects, business and life.
In order to get tasks, projects and important goals done, you have to be organized. You have to deal with a world of too much information and endless distractions. You need to process, priorize and execute.
I’ve read a lot of books about work and productivity, but arguably the most influential on me (and a lot of other high functioning executives and entrepreneurs) is David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.” It was a game changer for me personally. It’s a book I highly recommend and have gifted the most.
Like a lot of modern digital worker, I have struggled with all of the work and information I have to deal with. Figuring out your priorities and managing all of the stuff is hard. This is situation is the challenge of most modern digital workers, as Allen points out. His book and methodology pushed me get dominion over the “stuff” and create a system to get it out of my head and into a process.
The GTD system leads us to a better “product” of productivity: getting things done or, to put it another way, completed tasks, project and goals. The point is to get tasks done and projects advanced. In turn, this product of productivity (completed tasks) become a great measurement of your productivity too.
Todoist vs MyLife Organized (Light Edition, freeware) Todoist vs PersonalBrain; Todoist vs GTD-Free; Todoist vs eProductivity; Todoist vs iMeet Central; Todoist vs Swift To-Do List; Todoist vs Organizer for Outlook 2007+ Todoist vs d-cubed. GTD with Todoist overview The book is a quick read giving a good overview of using Todoist with the GTD system applied. Good for ideas using various trigger applications like IFTTT and Zapier, I may not setup these triggers but others may find then useful.
When it comes to implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” or GTD methodology, there are a lot of options. The book itself is fairly agnostic about a preferred tool and approach. Allen’s website lists several options from software (like Wunderlist, OneNote and Evernote) to physical notebooks. Most of the book looks at a non-digital approach of using paper, folders, file cabinets, and a calendar.
For the more digitally inclined, there are a lot options for managing your checklist, todo list and projects. A comprehensive review of checklist and task managers is beyond this post. Personally, in my first adaptation of GTD I used Evernote. By adapting Evernote, a flexible tool for handling notes and media, I created my own GTD task manager. For more on that, see “The GTD Way: Managing Your Tasks and Information with Evernote”.
About a year ago, I decided to switch to Todoist, a multiplatform task and project manager. It’s a tool with a bent towards GTD but also general good piece of software for handling tasks, projects and goals. My impetus for switching was tracking. My GTD Evernote System worked great, but as a slightly obsessed self-tracker, I wanted more data.
In this post we will look at David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology and how it applies to getting things done using Todoist. We will talk about a few best practices for using Todoist as your primary tool for task and project management.
Hopefully it can help you get better at mastering all of the stuff and focus on the “getting things done” part.
In the conclusion (and in more detail in a later post), we will dig into all of the tracking data on tasks and how you can use this to measure your productivity from small tasks to complex, multistep projects.
The Core Tenants of “Getting Things Done” (GTD)
“Getting Things Done” or GTD is the Productivity Philosophy originated by David Allen. In his book, Allen lays out his method, some basic principles and processes that allows us to handle all of modern life’s tasks and information. The GTD method lets you organize your TODOs, priorities, knowledge, and schedule so that everything becomes manageable. You put things in their place and mentally follow through on what needs to be next. His ultimate aim is to help you work in a productively “Zen” fashion.
To summarize “Getting Things Done”:
Put simply, GTD is a method for organizing your to-dos, priorities, and your schedule in a way that makes them all manageable. One of GTD’s biggest benefits is that it makes it easy to see what you have on your plate and choose what to work on next. It also has a strong emphasis on getting your to-dos out of your head and into a system you can refer to. This clears your mind of any mental distractions that will keep you from working efficiently. (Source: Productivity 101: A Primer to the Getting Things Done (GTD) Philosophy)
Its five tenants or steps are:
- Capture everything: This means you need to get everything out of your head and into a tool, whether digital or paper or organizational.
- Clarify the Actionable Steps: Things become unmanageable when you don’t know what to do next. So, take complicated projects like “Plan Trip” and break it up into a series of actionable steps. With everything that is a task, I do this by ensuring I write down what the next action is. By having an action to do next, a large task suddenly has a first few steps.
- Organize those actionable items by category and priority: Your organizational system, task tool or paper system should allow you to put things into proper categories, i.e. home tasks, work tasks, project-specific tasks, etc. Similarly you need a way order or prioritize your actionable items. A good way to do this is to assign due dates and set reminders for followups. In this step, you taking care of your system, calendar, todo list, etc.
- Reflect on your to-do list: This is the step where you pause before you start working. You look at your todo’s to see what your next action should be. You should have an idea on how much time or energy these tasks will take and can figure out what fits best with your availability.
- Engage and get to work: Allen doesn’t go into much depth on how you choose what to work on since, as he admits, once you have captured, clarified, organized and reflected, you tend to know what you should do next. A good system makes it easy to know what to work on and when. It’s now time to get to work.
To put it in a sentence, GTD encourages you to deal with the unprocessed “stuff” and put it in a well-organized place with a clear next step, before focusing and engaging in your work tasks.
Evernote and GTD: Why I Switched to Todoist
After my initial reading of Allen’s book, I started to implement different aspects of the system. Initially it was handling email. I got better and clarifying an email as a task, a piece of information or an undefined. This simple mental process made it easy to gain a much better mental state around my Inbox.
My next step in implementing GTD was leveraging Evernote. Evernote is still my favorite tool for handling all of my digital information from articles to notes to drafts to most media too. When it came managing tasks, Evernote can work great too. As I wrote up in “The GTD Way: Managing Your Tasks and Information with Evernote”, Evernote can be used to capture of all of the unprocessed junk and to turn that into knowledge storage or tasks. By leveraging Evernote’s tag structure and notebooks, it’s easy to keep everything organized and flowing.
In the end, applying many of GTD principles help me to improve my work and personal life. I was less stressed and felt in better control of an increasing work load. While it wasn’t the only factor, I was happier too.
I love Evernote and still do. There is something quite powerful about having everything in one system from initial unprocessed and notes to upcoming tasks and archived copy of what happened. Equally Evernote works great to store articles and book notes. That said, there were a couple issues in my GTD Evernote system.
Firstly, Evernote is not an optimized task manager tool. It is a tool for collecting and organizing information. As a task tool, Evernote offers checkboxes which I use for marking sub-tasks and aspects to work on, and it has reminders which are for time-sensitive tasks. But overall, it’s user experience and user interface is about text processing, not task processing.
Secondly, Evernote doesn’t offer internal stats. You can’t see your usage on which notes and word count changes. Premium version offers version control, which is a nice add-on, but essentially you can’t pull out a simple display of which tasks you completed over a period. It didn’t give me a measuring stick on my week.
Evernote remains a core player in my productivity toolkit. I still use it as my CRM, my article reader, note taker, life planner, goal tracker and writing journal. But it’s no longer my principle task management tool.
Not having the stats and improving handling an ever growing list of projects and tasks lead me to a more dedicated task management tools, like Todoist.
Todoist: A “Getting Things Done” Task Management Tool
Ultimately the goal of task management tools is to get better about handling all of the things we need to get done (without going crazy!).
If leveraged correctly, these same tools can provide behavioral tools to help you work and live better, to get better at completing complex projects and pursuit long-term goals. Equally, a good task management tool can provide a lot of interesting data and provide a way to answer some of these questions.
There are a lot tools out there for task management. Some are simple checklist apps like Wunderlist or Google’s Tasks, while others are much more full-featured approaches to productivity and project management. A lot of tools are for collaboration and team workflows. It seems like everyday there is some new software or app to try in the space. I’ve even got my own list of “Tools for Productive Awesome-ness.”
For a long time I resisted trying to switch task management systems, in spite of strong recommendations from friends using Omnifocus, Todoist, and a few others. My do-it-yourself “GTD Evernote” system was working for me. Evernote had become a very reliable task manager for me. I had no real complaints, besides some performance problems, not having higher-level analytics and the ability to oversee my week in terms of completed tasks.
But as I got more and more into self-tracking and personal data, I started to realize the value of high quality tools that offer you data points to understand your usage. In fact, I’d argue this is a critical component in the tools and services I use: I want my data. I want–err expect–at least the ability to export what I did on the platform, service or app.
So, in view of getting more data and tracking about my tasks, I switched to Todoist. It wasn’t easy changing tools, since I had established routines that worked, but I gave it a a week.
After a week of usage, here was my reaction: “After doing some review and thought, I see that it’s a superior system and that it will be a more seamless experience for task management. I also like the idea of a dedicated task manager and leave Evernote to do other things like be my digital file cabinet and be my writing book and my habit tracking journal. These are all of Evernote’s strengths.”
Since using Todoist several more months, I have come to see Todoist as broader approach to optimizing all of my tasks as well as a way to break down projects into a series of steps. Similarly I’ve been able to adapt Todoist to provide a good system for adding, tracking, and starting on my bigger, long-term goals.
Basics of Todoist: Projects, Tasks and Due Dates
Todoist has a number of great guides for usage and getting started. In particular I recommend, “A Comprensive Guide to Using Todoist”.
Todoist has a number of features and organizational principles. First off, you’ll want to create a “project” for a certain area or focus, like “Writing” or “Digital Marketing.” Once you have a project, you then create tasks.
You can organize and prioritize your tasks in a number of ways but the main engine of organizing is due dates. A due date can be like tomorrow, on March 30, etc. It can also function as repeat tasks with due dates like every Tuesday or once a month, etc.
The other way to organize tasks is by grouping them. So you can have a top-level task like “Write a Blog Post of X” and then a series of smaller tasks below them. By grouping and organizing them in order, it’s easy to follow what’s important next.
Once you are done with a task, you simply check it off.
Todoist keeps a record of your completed tasks and uses that to calculate your karma score, which is their simple tracking and gamification method. You also hae access to a full history and log of your completed tasks. This can be leveraged to know in a simple way how many tasks you are getting done as well as the ability to craft this into great task tracking. We will go more into this in later post.
The key to GTD is capturing everything into a system and avoiding letting your brain work to remember (and stress out) everything. All of my current and long-term future projects, tasks and goals now go into Todoist. Todoist lets me keep tasks and goals in one-place and each day and week I’m able to schedule my tasks.
Previously my main method around priority was that I’d work from high priority tasks to then work on important but less critical tasks. Everything else was later or someday. Todoist has a similar optic but it’s main focus is on scheduling task for each day. This allows a largely amount of flexibility and makes it easier for me to manage multiple personal and business project. I really love the scheduling aspect.
Getting It Out of Your Head and Into Todoist
To borrow a phrase from GTD, you need to get all of the stuff out of your head and into a system. If it’s a piece of information to store it goes in your file cabinet or, in my case, Evernote, which I liken to my digital memory.
For tasks, goals and projects you got to get it out of your head and into a task manager, which in my case is Todoist. Your mind will thank you.
When it comes to implementing a GTD-inspired system, here are some steps to keep in mind:
Step 0: Create Projects” The first thing is to focus on creating projects to best organize what you are and will be working on. Projects in Todoist act like your main silos for areas you want to focus on. For example, I have a project for my Web Development business and then sub-projects for areas like Business Development, Misc Client Work and Projects for our main clients. I have projects for creative work, for exercise and for several others areas. After some tweaks and back and forth, I ended up with a total of around 25 to 30 projects.
Step 2: Create Any and All Tasks: The most important thing though is to get all of these tasks and goals out of your head and into a system. This is essence of “Getting Things Done” methodology. So you’ll want to do a series of mind dumps and get everything you need to do out of your head and into a system like Todoist. This should include emails and anything you can think of that should be “task-ified.” Whenever something pops in your head as a task just put it in Todoist. You can sort it later.
Step 2: Sort It and Schedule It: The next step with GTD (and Todoist) is to organize and priorize. Avoiding mixing your mind dump with your organizational step. Once tasks and projects are in Todoist you can organize and prioritize. You can move tasks into their related projects and group them into task groups. You can add priority tags so items show up in order. And if you see this as something needed on a schedule, then you can leverage one of Todoist’s best features to schedule that task for a certain day, week or month.
GTD encourages segmenting your productivity process into different focuses. Don’t try to do it all at once. That means clarifying, sorting and scheduling are separate from reviewing and doing.
Step 3: Review Your Tasks and What’s Next: Once you have your tasks in Todoist and scheduled, you periodically need to review it. This means generally a daily check on what’s scheduled for today, tomorrow or this week. In my case I do this about 2 or 3 times per day. Once in the morning and again at the end of the day.
GTD also encourages a Weekly Review, which is when you have a block of time to process things, review how your system is going and reflect at a higher level.
Step 4: Choose and Execute: Allen calls this engaging with your work, and it boils down to work on your work. Now that you have a system that captures everything and a process to sort, prioritize and schedule, you can relax and focus on the work.
The goal of GTD with Todoist or any tool is to get the important stuff done. The aim is to achieve this while avoiding getting stressed about forgetting what you have to do. This is where GTD is a system for establishing where information, appointments and tasks are and providing periodic steps to sort, prioritize and schedule as well as higher altitude reviews.
Todoist makes this easier. It’s multiplatform so you can capture tasks anywhere. It’s GTD-inspired tagging and scheduled makes it clear what important tasks to do today and over a week, month or year. It can handle all forms of projects and tasks, so it’s searchable. It’s project views make it easy to visualize and sort your list of next steps. Its Today and 7 Day Views makes it clear what’s ahead in a manageable chunk.
Conclusion: Beyond “Getting Things Done,” Self-Tracking with Todoist
My main takeaway in adapting and leveraging GTD as the rules to how I work, create and live is that I have a lot of work but I rarely feel overworked. This transition happened by processing, prioritizing, scheduling and then working.
I rarely have to overthink about what’s my next main task. I know because I’ve either scheduled my time for something or its a key task in my upcoming agenda.
In this post, we did a pretty thorough review of David Allen’s productivity system “Getting Things Done.” We highlighted its five core tenants:
- Capture everything: From articles to questions to anything, develop a system to put information and tasks in their place.
- Clarify the Actionable Steps: Failing to state what you need to do in a certain area makes you anxious. So take unprocessed things and establish what the next step should be. For larger projects come up with several next steps
- Organize those actionable items by category and priority: Order those next actionable items by priority and schedule them. Todoist makes this easy. Once you do, suddenly a lot of uncertainty disappears. You may have to adjust the schedule but having it settled for now means you don’t have to worry about mentally.
- Reflect on your to-do list: A couple times a day check your calendar and todoist to see where things stand. Work requirements change so you may need to reschedule items or modify today’s priorities. That’s ok. Just ensure you are working towards completing the important stuff as well as the immediate stuff. And don’t forget to do weekly reviews too.
- Engage and get to work: Once your information is organized in accessible ways and your priority tasks are clarified, you can work in a state of zen. You don’t stress out about the tasks and projects since you know you’ve got a system for it. You can focus on the work.
I find GTD’s principles and way of thinking to be extremely helpful in organizing and executing on my priorities and projects. It does take a level of commitment. You need to slowly but surely close the gaps between a system to manage your information and tasks and what you keep in your head.
While GTD encourages certain behaviors and best practices, the final application needs to be your own. In my case, I’m almost entirely digital, so using tools like Evernote and Todoist makes the most sense.
Along with becoming good at getting things done, Todoist opens up several avenues to explore just how well you to work. Quite simply Todoist tracks how many tasks you get done over periods and from which projects. You can get your overall completed tasks number for a day, week or overall. It then generates some nice charts to visualize it, and Todoist even has a gamification system called Karma that provides a bit of a push to keep you on-task more often.
Whether or not you are intersted in personal tracking, simple metrics like a daily goal of completed tasks is a good anchor for a productive life. By default, Todoist has a daily goal of five completed tasks.
Gtd Todoist Template
Beyond its own internal system, the data around completed tasks in Todoist can be exported or integrated with other systems to further explore. In my case, I pull this data into a spreadsheet application. By looking at the data I noticed a tendency to fall into the checklist trap of completing lots of small tasks instead of bigger, harder tasks. We like checking off things and tend to procrastinate about more difficult and ill-defined projects.
By noticing this tendency, I’ve been able to adjust my process to focus more on higher priority tasks per day and per week. So, for me it’s not just about getting anything done, it’s about getting the important stuff done. Todoist data helped expose this realization.
Tracking and data analysis using Todoist is another topic to explore in part 2. For now, hopefully I’ve been able to expose enough of an overview of Getting Things Done and Todoist to get you started.
What productivity tools do you use? How are you leveraging them to work better and more productive? Share your thoughts in the comments.
GTD Journey: Moving back to Todoist (once again!)
I was excited about the Nirvana app as you can read here. I still think it’s the best out-of-the-box implementation of GTD on a multi-platform web-based app. A few things discouraged me to continue relying on the app. Nirvana’s development is slow and I got a little bit upset about an update released back in July with a few bugs. Those bugs were addressed in a later update, but that week dealing with the app’s hiccups got me thinking about other apps for my GTD tasks system.
So, as any good-old productivity nerd, I looked back at some apps.
My initial thoughts were:
- Facile Things: it’s strictly GTD-based, but for me it has a clunky interface and too little flexibility.
- Nozbe: it’s good, but expensive. I like the way it organizes and filters by context, but the interface was not my favorite.
- Todoist: I’m already used to it. One of my all-time favourites for task management. Latest updates changed the project's behavior, but Calendar integration and total flexibility is its highlight.
After a week testing these apps I tried to understand why Nirvana was not cutting it for me anymore. It all has to do with friction. How easy it is to add something to my Inbox? Am I getting a trusted list of my next actions? Are there things falling through the cracks? How can I track them? Is it easy to coordinate my next actions and my calendar events? Do I like to see my lists? Am I avoiding my lists out of fear?
I identified that a critical Nirvana’s limitation to my system was: lack of calendar integration.
I will pause here to mention that the GTD framework does not require you to have your tasks scheduled in your Calendar. That’s something to avoid because it can create stress about “wishing” to get several things done in a given day and then getting frustrated because the plan didn’t work. I’ve been there before. The first time I used Todoist I went crazy with scheduling tasks. But they were not hard deadlines. They were only my wishes. There must be a clear separation between your Calendar and your next actions list. Strictly speaking, what goes into the Calendar are things that must be done that day. Side note over.
I realized that I live inside Google Calendar because of my work. All team meetings/discussions/reviews with co-workers/managers and all deadlines are scheduled on Google Calendar. I always keep it open so that I can be on top of everything.
I need to track multiple deadlines: review estimates, send requests, follow-up on trades. And these are part of various project’s next action lists. Deadlines change, things get moved around, and for me it’s easier to manage all these in one centralized place, with the option to group by Project. Having the ability to see crucial tasks on my Calendar saves me a lot of headaches and help me plan my week and my day.
Todoist came to the rescue!
So, because of my work rhythm and multiple deadlines, I realized that having my task manager linked to my Calendar was important to my workflow. But it must be done in a systematic manner, otherwise I loose control and it’s chaos and overwhelm again!
Apart from the Calendar Integration, I must highlight additionalTodoistfeatures that I enjoy:
- The “Quick Add” feature is extremely handy, and the natural language recognition makes processing tasks a breeze.
- The mobile app is smooth and responsive.
- The inline commands and natural language processing that recognizes dates in tasks makes organizing my system a friction less process.
- Emojis and colours 🎈! I missed those. They make my lists attractive, and the last thing I want is to be repulsed by my to-do list.
- HTML links on the task titles/comments. I missed those on Nirvana, it’s visually better.
- Integration with Gmail to send messages as tasks directly into Todoist. I was using an @Action tag in Gmail to mark messages I needed more time to elaborate a reply (if I can do it in 2 minutes I just do it straight away from my inbox). It turns out these labelled emails would pile up and I would forget about them. I don’t lose track when they are neatly organized in a context inside Todoist.
Getting back to Todoist
Question I had to ask myself:How could I simplify my system and make it work on Todoist?
I once had my system on Todoist but I abandoned it because it was too complex. I got lost trying to make my filters work. I didn’t have a clear understanding of what was active or not. I suffered from “list overwhelm”. I went off the GTD wagon. But now, after spending some time with Nirvana, I got a few ideas on how to reconfigure my system on Todoist. These were my thoughts:
I was inspired by the neatly organized categories in Nirvana and its “Focus” function. It works as a daily dashboard with those Most-Important-Tasks up front.
Some crucial tasks will be scheduled. These will include any actions with a hard deadline. I must do it with careful precision so not to create an overwhelming and unattainable weekly plan.
I will use Todoist for routines and deadlines because of the Google Calendar integration. I like to mark them as “completed” once I’m done.
I discovered that the previous setup I had on Todoist was not so bad, I had to make some changes to have more streamlined lists and a clear distinction between what was active and what belonged to “Someday-Maybe”.
I wanted a simpler way to deal with “next actions”. Previously I was using a “@next-action” label on Todoist to mark them. I decided to delete it and use the built-in priority flags to indicate action status.
My Todoist Setup
Basic setup:
- Projects for Projects, tasks within projects for next actions and labels for next actions contexts. Yes, I am the kind of person who likes to have tasks linked to their projects, so that I have the option to view actions by Project or by Context.
- 2 Main Areas of Focus to group Projects:Personal and Work. I use these main areas to filter between work and personal tasks.
- I have Someday/Maybe as a separate “project folder” so that I can filter it out of my next actions list filter. All inactive projects and tasks go here, and they will never show-up on my actions lists. It’s an easy way to temporarily “deactivate” a project. To make it active again, I just move it back into my “Personal” or “Work” folder.
- All my Routines are grouped using the new “Sections” Todoist feature: Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly tasks. They live inside my main Areas of Focus project folder.
- Tickler: A place to park a reminder for the future. It will show up on my lists and on my Calendar on the day scheduled. I don’t use it too often.
- Agendas: I create a task to store agenda items to be discussed with other people.
- Books: I track all the books I already own that I want to read next using the priority flags (P1 = Reading, P2 = Read next, P3 = Read Later). It’s where I go to at the end of the month to decide what I want to read the following month.
- Yoga: A placeholder for online yoga classes I want to check out.
- Recipes to try: A placeholder for recipes I saw online and want to try.
- To Watch: a collection of movies I want to watch. No rush.
- My GTD System: a resources list with links to my other GTD tools (mostly kept in OneDrive as Word or Excel files).
- GTD Review: I have a separate project to store my GTD Review tasks. These are all repeating scheduled actions, so they will only show up on the day they are due.
Action Status and Contexts
Next Action Status: I use the Priority flags to indicate the status of the task because they are mutually exclusive. It’s easy to update them if needed (no confusion with adding /deleting labels). This is how I use flags:
- 🟥 P1 – MIT (Most Important Task) => Do Today! (these will show in my “Focus” view)
- 🟧 P2 – NEXT / THIS WEEK
- 🟦 P3 – SOON/THIS MONTH
- ⬜ P4 – NO PRIORITY/NOT READY/LATER
Contexts (labels in Todoist): I have the classic ones, plus a few more. They are updated/deleted as needed: @computer, @calls, @deep-work, @quick, @email, @home, @ideas, @errands, @plan-brainstorm, @waiting-for, @writing, @learning, @for-fun, @routines, @deadlines
Gettings Things Done
Filters: this is how I organize my Lists
Filters: I have the filters on my Favorites list and it’s my daily view when I use Todoist. The rule here is to have only P1, P2 and P3 tasks showing up on my lists. A P4 flag indicates that an action is not ready yet, so this flag “parks” next actions inside a project if needed.
FOCUS ⭐: all P1 actions, due today, overdue
DEADLINES 💣: tasks with the label @deadlines. Used to track my work tender closing dates.
NEXT ACTIONS-WORK: all active tasks, for when I want an overall view of what’s on my plate => Today + overdue + P1+P2+P3 that are inside the Work Project
NEXT ACTIONS-PERSONAL: all active Personal tasks => today + overdue + P1+P2+P3 that are inside the Personal Project
ERRANDS: 🚙 all my @errands
COMPUTER 💻 : all my @computer, my filter query breaks them into “Work” and “Personal”
CALLS: ☎ all my @calls, my filter query breaks them into “Work” and “Personal”
EMAILS: ✉ all my @emails actions, my filter query breaks them into “Work” and “Personal”
FOR FUN & LEARNING: 😎 a recent addition to my lists, it groups my @for-fun and @learning labels. This will include browsing the internet to search for something, online courses, playing video games, hiking, etc.
HOME 🏠: all my @home tasks
DEEP WORK 🧠: I use it as an energy level indicator for tasks that will take more than 1 hour and requires my full concentration.
QUICK AND EASY ⛱: another energy level, to have a list of easy tasks when I have 10 or less minutes before a meeting, for example.
🎨 CLARIFY: groups all that is inside my Inbox + @plan-brainstorm + @ideas
WAITING-FOR ☕: @waiting-for, my filter query breaks them into “Work” and “Personal”
LATER: all tasks that are P4. I only review these on my Weekly Review to see if there are actions that need to be activated.
SOMEDAY-WORK: for Weekly Review purposes, showing all someday-maybe tasks.
SOMEDAY-PERSONAL: same as above.
How do I use Todoist with the Calendar Integration
I set up Todoist to show me my “Focus⭐” list when I first open it up.
This is my favorites section that is always open on my side bar:
I keep the Projects, Labels and Filters Menu hidden.
On Google Calendar my actions that have a due date (always set as an “All Day” event) will show up on the top portion of the calendar. Once I complete the actions on Todoist, they disappear from the Calendar. In the past I’ve had “all day events” on Google for scheduled routines but then I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t mark it as complete. Things like “Pay the Rent”. I like to check if off as done, it gives my brain closure. I need (and love) the satisfaction of crossing things of my lists.
And since there is 2-way sync between Google Calendar and Todoist it’s handy for me to move actions around in Google Calendar while I’m planning my week/day and the changes will be reflected on Todoist.
So, I moved all actionable recurring tasks from Google Calendar to Todoist. That way I can see a complete list of my routines in one place and make updates or adjustments as needed.
Final thoughts about the transition
I started transitioning to Todoist back in July. It was a busy month, I was overwhelmed with multiple projects and feeling anxious. I did not have everything under control. And while “Rome was burning” I needed a tool I was familiar with that offered nimble capturing and processing capabilities. I could quickly transition to Todoist and make it work to handle the fire.
It’s been going smooth so far. I’m satisfied. This setup is running on the background without getting in the way. I solved all the friction issues I was having with capturing, processing and organizing my actions. I don't avoid my task manager out of guilt and anxiety anymore.
This transition triggered changes in other aspects of my GTD system as well. After I got the ground floor (actions) and Horizon 1 (projects) under control, I had some headspace to think about the higher horizons , references and planning routines. I will talk more about those changes in future posts.
Take care!
Other Posts about my GTD Journey:
Todoist Gtd Setup
By Noisy DeadlinesMinimalist in progress, nerdy, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.