My setup of filters in Todoist

I’m a big fan of Todoist, and I’ve used it as my main to-do app for around 7 years. I picked it after some extensive research after Wunderlist was bought by Microsoft. Recently a colleague asked me about my setup, Here’s a short overview:

• I have one Todoist per project or context, and I sort these into two main projects: Work and Personal.
  • E.g. two engagements become Engagement 1 and 2 as subprojects in Work.
  • If I have several actual projects/initiatives with that engagement, I might have multiple subprojects for that as well.
• Each project has two sections: Do Now and Backlog
• This enables me to have the following really useful filters:
  • Overdue first, then inbox, then all work items for today, and finally all personal items for today: overdue, #Inbox, (##Work & today), (##Personal & today)
  • Do Now or Backlog for a context: (##Work ) & /Do Now or (##Work ) & /Backlog, and similarly with ##Personal

See here for more on how filters work in Todoist, and more suggestions on use.

In addition, I have a separate main project for agendas with people, i.e. things I want to talk about with person X.

It’s also worth mentioning the tool Tascaly, which creates a calendar event for tasks that has a scheduled time of day, as well as a label for how long it’ll take. E.g. today at 13 @1h becomes a 1-hour slot at 13:00.

I have also made it easy for me to send tasks to Todoist. So I’ve added the Todoist extension for my email apps, and to Slack. This enables me to schedule/plan for everything in one place. Sadly, the Todoist extension for Slack only supports one Slack team at a time. To enable me to add tasks from multiple teams, I’ve set up this zap from Zapier.

The next step for all this to be useful is having a process around that set up to put dates on your Do Now tasks, sort your inbox into projects, and move new items from your backlog into Do Now. That’s a longer story for another time.