WHAT IS IT AND WHY IS IT GOOD?

Time management is essential these days both in our personal and professional lives. As someone who takes on a lot of projects in both of those areas, I needed to find a way to keep it all organized. After trying several different platforms I found that an app called Todoist had what I was looking for and has helped me stay focused on what needs to be done along with prioritizing important tasks both personally and professionally.

Easy To Access + Easy To Use

The first thing I looked for in a productivity app is “Is it accessible?”. If you can’t access your list when a task is born it defeats the purpose of helping your brain by offloading the information. Adding tasks right when they come up is crucial, so the fact that Todoist has a desktop app, web browser app, and mobile app certainly checks the accessibility box. The ease of use part comes from the fact that it is very intuitive, everything is where you would expect for the most part and adding tags, labels, scheduling items can all be done when typing the task using natural language along with things like hashtags to make it easy to put things where you want them.

Projects, Labels, and Filters

More simple to-do programs put everything on one level of hierarchy giving you a lot to look at and decode visually, Todoist allows you to keep tasks in their own projects to keep things organized along with their labels and filters features to keep things manageable. Every project and task can have colors assigned to make it easy to connect tasks with projects. Labels apply a tag to your task which allows you to easily find it and other tasks like it later. For example, if I have multiple coding projects I can label those tasks with a “code” label. Then if I want to take a look at all my coding tasks I can just search that label. Filters are just that, quick ways to filter tasks. You could filter all tasks that have a high priority for example or tasks that are assigned to certain people to see how they are coming along.

Subtasks

Subtasks were an absolute must. With more complex projects you may need to break things down beyond one simple to-do. Subtasks let you nest tasks under the main task(have I typed task enough times?). You can also fold the main task so you don’t have to see a mess of things all at once which helps prevent visual clutter. One thing I would like to see is a percentage bar showing how far along certain projects are based on tasks and subtasks completed. For example, if you had 10 tasks in a project and completed 5 it would let you know the project is 50% complete. To take it a step further it would be nice if you could weigh harder tasks to give you a more accurate idea of how far along your project is.

 

Boards

Todoist isn’t just focused on the individual. You can include other members of a team in your tasks as well. Business/team-focused apps like Trello and Asana use horizontal visual structures to easily display a project for its team members. Boards are Todoists response to that by showing you a side-by-side view of your tasks where you can get a good visual of what needs to be done, what is being worked on, and what has been completed. 

 

Final Verdict

Todoist’s feature-packed, multi-platform application stands up well against its competitors without overcomplicating the process. It’s a good middle-of-the-road option for both individuals as well as smaller teams to stay organized and get things done on time all at half the price of its competition.

Bonus points because it has a dark mode:)

COMPATIBILITY?

The program can be used on both Mac and PC as well as iOS and Android. There are also browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

If you have suggestions of similar programs leave them in the comments!