todoist makes you do it

In French, we have this beautiful expression to describe someone who's distracted: être dans la lune (to be in the moon). I'm always in the moon. Such a behaviour can become problematic with a family of four kids and a dog.

I'm in the moon!

The solution we've found: to do lists. For everything, every day: an endless stream of papers. Don't laugh! Psychologists say they relieve anxiety about the chaos of life! Now that I've found todoist, I can finally get rid of them! The papers, not the lists!

Exploring the app

I've used todoist on my mobile device for two weeks. I went two full "crazy weekends" with the app. On Fridays we log everything that must get done, and I'm off to the races to check them off! The first image shows a preliminary list of tasks. todoist allows users to label every task easily so you can filter them by theme (I created "chore" for the tasks and added them to a "Boring Stuff" category within my "Personal" project. I hadn't discovered the "Priority" attribute, which is another piece of metadata to filter and re-order your tasks either in list or in kanban form.

Pretty straightforward, right? Not so fast, cowboy! todoist has one of the coolest natural-language processing (NLP) features I have ever used that allows users to create tasks with an extremely simple syntax. In the second image you see how todoist's NLP model understands timestamps to avoid you a needless press. Hot keys are intuitive: just add a # to sort the task in a given project, an @ to add a label, and !! for the priority and you've got in 5 seconds a fully organized new task. "Honey, go pickup medication at the pharmacy after work, highest priority" becomes "Pickup meds at 5 PM @[select shopping] #[select Personal] !!1", which I can input holding the phone with one hand.  The virtual keyboard conveniently places the @ and # right where your thumbs needs it to trigger the selection.

The immersive experience enhances productivity: whether at work or in my personal life, I'm always on the go, picking up instructions, ideas, and, huh, to-dos! I need to catch the words fast on my phone, and if I need to re-sort the notes taken on the fly, I feel overwhelmed.

Once on desktop, in the evening, todoist's web or desktop apps can support the heavy-lifting. I used a nice "Blog Post" template as my main "ppfosec newsletter" project. I clone the template that I've updated with my labels, priorities and categories, for each edition. Desktop shows a state of the art kanban to track my progress. Sure, I'm so used to my own rituals that I would not need the checklist. But let's be honest, you want that little rush of satisfaction when you check them off! Plus, when I'm beaten up and need a dose of motivation to sit down and write, it's easier to trick my mind back into "action mode" when I see an easy task in my app. "Oh yeah, I gotta change the keywords in my excerpt" is more palatable than "Jeez, I need to make my website more SEO-friendly!".

todoist understands. You can review your "karma" both in browser and mobile which gives a simple dose of gamification. We're not in the elite tiers of reporting we commonly see in project management apps, of course, but for personal use, this is just enough, just on time.

Finally, there are the intangibles. The product provides a stream of templates suggestions and relevant blog posts which feels like a little personal coach. It is the advantage of being such a single-purpose app. With a simple learning curve and a simple focus, the todoist team can show off their expertise and dig a little deeper. Most applications embed such cues. They need to in order to reduce complexity. When an app is simple, it can focus on the user's problems!

It is not a coincidence that I've discovered todoist thanks to the Hive blog. Hive was one of my favourites project management apps (see my five-star review). I see a similar commitment to product design and minimalism.

Recommended Use Cases

Where was todoist when I needed it all this time? todoist is essential for busy techies like me who always have their hands full, cannot have two minutes sitting down to save their lives, and yet must juggle dozens of balls in their daily lives. "Where's the pen and paper?" was one of my most asked question. Or what about my partner texting me to cancel an appointment? It's 10 PM, how do I remember?  

Limitations

todoist integrates with Zapier and ITTT for generic API workflows, which is fine. I resisted using todoist for my work because I did not want to input any company information in it. Most businesses will not accept employees using todoist to synchronize with their enterprise project management tools. Maybe this is why there are no out-of-the-box integrations with the Asanas, Clickups, Monday, etc.?

Pricing

The question todoist ask its users is simple: are reminders worth $5/month to you? This is the feature that will convert users to paid plans. I did not use the teams' version for my review.

Verdict

todoist is a game-changer for anyone looking to boost their productivity. Its lean design and intuitive task-creating features leveraging natural language make it the ultimate tool for streamlining daily tasks, especially for distracted people like me!