Tool review: Todoist

Todoist: much todo about nothing?

Thanks to fragileheart for suggesting this tool.

I’m a very organised person, but right now, my to-do lists are a complete mess. The list for my day job uses my tips for writing a great to-do list, but my other lists are all over the place. I have an online issue tracker for Injader changes, along with bits of paper, emails, text files, Word documents, the list goes on and on. Far too many things that I just keep losing track of.

To restore some order, I’ve decided to give Todoist a whirl. It’s a free tool that allows you to manage your work effectively. First you register and sign in, then you start adding projects. These are used for organising your tasks. Key features include: sub-projects, priorities, due dates, task schedule, task search, plus a few other things I probably haven’t found yet.

Some things I already like (bear in mind this is only after 30 minutes of use):

1. Adding projects, sub-projects and tasks is really quick and easy.
2. Shortcuts for setting event dates - such as “tomorrow”, or “next tue” - very handy indeed.
3. Collapsing projects is handy for when I don’t want to show you my private work
4. It’s a small thing, but I like the numbers that show me how many tasks I’ve got in a project, and I also like the way they add up when you collapse a project.
5. There’s optional Gmail / Firefox integration. Haven’t used it yet but it’s good to have!

Some things I would like to see:

1. Some better colours would be nice, or more of them. This is also a problem with labels in Gmail. Let me use a proper colour picker, and I’ll be much happier!
2. Better use of priorities, as right now they aren’t useful enough. I can view ALL priority 1 items, but not all priority 1 items in a specific project, and when viewing a project I can’t sort the items by priority. With Injader, dates aren’t really relevant, it’s all about the priorities.
3. I’d like to be able to drag an item to the left or the right as well as up and down. Reordering projects is handy, as is the way you can make a sub-project by indenting it, but it’s quite tricky if you want to do both.
4. Not so much a request, more of a small annoyance. Some of the shortcuts are weird and override standard functions. e.g. I often use CTRL + cursor left or right to jump between words. When adding a task or a project, I can’t do this because the same key combination is used to indent or outdent items.
5. The “add above” / “add below” terminology is confusing. Adding a project above or below the current item puts it at the same level, which kind of makes sense, except I thought it would actually make it a sub-project - so it appears at the level below the current item. An option to add a sub-project beneath the current project would help instead of having to add then indent it.

Overall, I think Todoist is a really handy application, and I’m going to try using it to see if it’s a suitable replacement for my existing methods.

Have you tried Todoist? What do you like about it? What would you change?