Review : Todoist

🚧 Update → I no longer recommend Todoist 🚧

I started playing around with Todoist back in April of 2013 when I needed an efficient solution for grocery lists while shopping in a store and the traditional folded paper lists were becoming obnoxious and were only a placeholder anyway. I liked the ease of the mobile experience, everything loaded & synced fast, and the UI was very easy to understand and navigate. Despite liking the app I fell victim to Wunderlist’s seductive design. I went back to using Todoist in April of 2015 after deciding to ditch Wunderlist soon after their 3rd version, which looked awful, almost Windows 8 inspired (later they were acquired by Microsoft, go figure).

What first catches my eye about Todoist is the zen-like simplicity of the interface. All of the GTD-based task apps that I’ve tried had many view links on the sidebar but Todoist only has three: Inbox, Today, and Next 7 Days. Having these as the only main views forced me to focus on today and the week but nothing beyond. Other apps like OmniFocus will list every task due for the entire month under their Forecast tab and to have any other date-based views, you’d have to manually create them but keep in mind they won’t pull in scheduled tasks. Todoist lets you nest folders inside folders inside folders which was bliss for me. I had every project and subproject neatly organized and tucked away for later.

In terms of a “to-do list” type of application, Todoist exceeds expectations and includes repeating tasks, notes/comments, labels, filters, due dates, duplication, activity logs, quick find, notifications, natural language input, and karma point scores. Yes, karma! Can you tell I love karma? I firmly believe all productivity apps should have karma but more on that another time. If you click on your karma score, an activity drop-down window shows you how many tasks you’ve completed within the last 7 days and within the last 4 weeks and breaks down each progress bar by the color of associated project. I found myself becoming addicted to meeting my daily and weekly task goals.

So what do I use Todoist for since leaving Wunderlist? I use it to plan my day (with some tasks having scheduled times), to toss random ideas or notes into the Inbox, to remind myself of important repeating tasks, and of course, to make sure I don’t forget any items at the grocery store.

What I found Todoist is great for:

• daily tasks (no more than 10)
• shopping lists
• grocery lists
• packing checklists
• reminders (notifications & repeating tasks)
• creating tasks from photos (mobile)
• creating tasks from other sources (share button)
• planning out your day (date & time)
• organization of projects

What I found Todoist sucks at:

• collaboration
• several tasks & projects
• storing tasks in the Inbox (200 task limit)
• planning & projecting for the month, quarter, or year
• maintaining a dedicated space for projects

Lack of Fluid Movement

The biggest pain point for me in Todoist is not being able to drag & drop tasks from the Today view into other views like Next, Later, or Someday, a concept almost exclusively found in GTD-based apps like Nirvana or Things, based on the book: Getting Things Done by David Allen. The reason why having this ability is so crucial is because (1) we’re human, we’re going to have incomplete tasks almost on a daily basis, and (2) the only way to have tasks automatically appear in the Today view is to set due dates for those tasks but luckily you can bulk edit tasks by holding down Command or Shift while selecting tasks, doing so will bring up a option bar at the top of the screen over the header, allowing you to reschedule, move to another project, and more.

In Nirvana, I could “schedule” tasks to appear in the Today view while keeping “due dates” separate, meaning I almost never used due dates unless the task really called for them. Having tasks appear in Today was more like a reminder to do them without forcing a deadline and locking those tasks to a specific date. And whenever I had overdue tasks, I would simply select all of them at once (something that RTM and Notion allow) and drag them into the Next view. Problem solved.

So as you can see, if you have 10+ overdue tasks on a daily basis, it quickly becomes tiring to update each task’s due date. Todoist actually realized this was a major issue for their userbase, stating that “over 70% of Todoist users have overdue tasks” and introduced a feature in November 2016 called Smart Schedule, which Todoist claims uses AI to determine ideal due dates based on your habits, urgency, context, daily task load, goals, and more. I’ve used this feature numerous times but it almost never accurately predicted my needs. I’m not trying to diss the Todoist team, I’m sure they work hard, but I think it would have made more sense to allow tasks in Today to be dragged into a Next or Later view, which they could have added below Today on the left nav bar. This could have easily saved them time and I can only imagine how much it costs to build AI features.

Teamwork, People!

The one thing that made me realize that collaboration wasn’t something I would use Todoist for was how the app handles assigned tasks. When you assign a task to someone, the task is removed from your Today view and it can only be seen in the project folder it belongs to or in the Assigned To Others filter view, which is always hidden from sight if you tend to use the projects view on a daily basis like I do. If you collaborate with people who get tasks done on a daily basis, you probably have nothing to worry about but if you are assigning tasks to people who don’t use Todoist as much or have their hands full, not knowing the status of important tasks can be anxiety provoking.

Quirks

Probably the most annoying thing that I run into in Todoist is when I accidentally change the hierarchy of several project folders and then need to manually move each folder back one at a time. For example, say I have a folder called Shopping List and inside that folder, I have 15 folders for each store that I might shop at. If I move the 1st store folder to the left, it now becomes the parent folder for the other 14 stores. Then I have to drag every store folder to the left to bring them all back to where they were placed originally. An easy fix that the Todoist team could implement would be to only let you move folders to the left if they are collapsed. This way, you could easily move parent folders around freely and if you need to create children folders, you can still drag them to the right.

Another thing that I do constantly is accidentally scheduling a task for a time in the past because I forgot to specify “pm” so the task gets scheduled for the next year. I wish there was a warning that would ask you if you really want to schedule a year out from today.

Outro

If you’re looking for a better way to handle to do lists, remind yourself of monthly tasks (like paying rent), and shop for groceries, Todoist is probably a great solution for you. If you’re looking for a better way to manage intricate projects, collaborate with team members, or start a business, Todoist is probably not the best solution for you.

Despite some issues, Todoist is a solid task platform and outranks its competitors: Remember The Milk, Wunderlist, and Any.do. I still use Todoist every day among all the other productivity apps in my arsenal. Without Todoist’s visual activity tracking, I would never have gotten so much damn stuff done.

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