Using Todoist for Project/Team Management

Todoist is our task management tool for Joy Machine and Steel Hunters. There are an abundance of reasons that we’ve decided on this as opposed to traditional tasking solutions like JIRA, Asana, Trello, etc.

• I hate Kanban (Trello).
• Todoist is a very light, customizable solution for project management. And it’s a very approachable software package for just about anyone.
• It allows us a great deal of flexibility in how we setup our particular task assignment/update/completion process.
• While not initially intuitive in some aspects, Todoist offers a lot of flexibility with filters and labels that make customized “dashboards” incredibly easy to define (once you know the query strings).
• If there’s a website in existence, it almost assuredly has a Todoist integration.

Some of the additional benefits that we’ve discovered while trying out varying techniques to make things as easy as possible for our team to use Todoist successfully; one of these features is the ease in which you can create entirely new tasks that capture a variety of details due to Todoist’s great text interpreter:

• “Implement an MMO by Tuesday at 3:30pm.” — This will translate to a task for “Implement an MMO” with a deadline of the following Tuesday at 3:30pm.
• “Meet with Trent every Wednesday at 11:30pm” — This translates to a recurring task every Wednesday at 11:30 for “Meet with Trent”.
• “Game doesn’t work. @bug p1 #steelhunters +trent” — This translates to a task “Game doesn’t work.”, filed with a label of “bug” (any number of labels can be specified), put into the project “steelhunters” (limit is one project), and assigns the task to Trent (limit is one assignee).

And if you’re not a fan of the string-based shortcuts, the UI has all the necessary components to accomplish all of the same functionality.

One of the more annoying workflow issues that arise is that if you want to notify multiple people on any changes to the task or any updates that are made to that task, you have to first create the task, and then you have to post a comment to the task and tag the relevant people to notify on that comment (at which point they will be notified for any changes to that particular task).

In conclusion: I really, really hate Kanban.

Comment Threads

While we all use and read Slack and coordinate efforts and tasks and such using that, Slack is not a useful tool for status updates, questions, issues, schedule updates (including if you think you’ll miss the assigned date — which isn’t usually a problem, but it’s helpful for us to know), and, most importantly, when you are blocked on something.

Whenever you comment, you can always choose to notify anyone you wish on the project just to ensure people are aware of your updates. At the minimum, ensure you mark <your relevant people/producer> regardless of what the task is about, as we are running the production/schedule for the project. You should also opt-in anyone that’s related to the task as well.

Finally : Even I forget this from time-to-time (always), but Todoist has complete support for file/image attachments in comment threads. So feel free to use and abuse that.

Karma

There’s a “Karma” functionality built-in to Todoist which, essentially, is just a bit of gamification/statistics to try and encourage consistent task completion/monitoring. It’s stupid and simple, but also it can appeal to people. Like me, who loves stats more than I do most people. Look!

Labels

Labels are, well, labels (or tags, more appropriately). They are just ways of classifying the miscellaneous areas of the project a given task is related to. It’s helpful for creating search filters as well. For the most part, you can just choose a task’s label based on the available ones we’ve setup, but there is one very important label you must all use:

The “Blocked” Label

Of all the varying labels, the “Blocked” label ( @blocked ) is an important way that <your producers/project managers> can all quickly identify tasks that have been blocked (always leave a comment in the task when you mark a task as blocked — including tagging the relevant people for notification.

The Rest of the Labels

• bug
• team
• business
• content
• engine
• gameplay
• backend
• networking
• design
• ui/ux
• docs
• tools
• meeting
• marketing
• site
• future-work — This label is exempt from most search queries related to due dates or lack of assigned team member.
• And then there are always labels for relevant upcoming milestones.

Filters

Filters are the absolute best thing ever. It sounds like an incredibly simple thing, but Todoist has a unique search system that allows you to setup and customize your filters for whatever things you need to track. Whether it’s “Assigned to Me”, “Overdue Tasks”, etc.

The most important part of filters is that you can set your opening screen/page in Todoist to whatever filter is most useful for you. You can find this in “Todoist Settings” as “Start Page.”

Unfortunately, as of the time of writing, we cannot simply share filters or create team-wide filters, so you’ll need to create your own manually. LUCKILY WE HAVE A LIST BELOW!

Helpful Filters and Their Query String

My Tasks

assigned to: me

View All

view all

My Tasks — Today

assigned to: me & today

My Tasks — Blocked

assigned to: me & @blocked

My Tasks — Overdue

assigned to: me & over due

My Tasks — No Due Date

assigned to: me & no date & !(@future-work)

Team’s Tasks — Blocked

shared & @blocked

Team’s Tasks — Today

shared & today

Team’s Tasks — Overdue

shared & over due

Team’s Tasks — Unassigned

shared & !assigned

Future Improvements

I don’t think Todoist is by any means perfect and it’s definitely not as feature-rich as a lot of other task management solutions, but at the same time — how many people actually know how to use JIRA to its full capabilities? The most important thing for me as far as Todoist as our chosen software for project management is concerned is that, since I first started using it a year ago, it has improved in incredibly smart and clean ways. It’s just an easy-to-use and well-designed application.

The biggest things that Todoist is lacking from our perspective right now is visualizations of timelines and overall schedules for a project (which, to be fair, I don’t think it’s actually meant for that). But that’s something that a couple of the Joy Machine folks are working on resolving as we speak to help us further our dedication to company transparency through visualization progress on our game in real-time.