Getting Started with Todoist: Organize Tasks and Projects

Becky from Todoist explains how to create and manage tasks, projects, due dates, and recurring tasks in Todoist for personal and work use.

### Getting Started with Todoist: Account Setup, Projects, Due Dates, and Key Features
* 📝 To get started, create a free Todoist account by visiting Todoist.com and completing a **short onboarding flow** to set up your profile.
* 🗂 Projects are used to group related tasks together, making it easier to **organize your tasks**. You can create a project by clicking the plus icon in the sidebar, naming the project, assigning a color, and choosing a layout (**list, board, or calendar**).
* ⏰ Due dates are an essential feature in Todoist. You can quickly add a due date to a task by typing it in the task field. Todoist recognizes various date formats like "**today**," "**tomorrow**," specific dates, and recurring due dates (e.g., **weekly**, **monthly**).
* 📅 Recurring due dates are great for tasks that repeat at regular intervals, such as **monthly reports**, **taking out the trash**, or **sending birthday cards**. Completing a task with a recurring due date **resets it for the next instance**.
* 📋 Subtasks can be used to **break down complex tasks** into smaller, more manageable steps. You can add subtasks in the Task Details view and **complete them independently**.
* 📥 The Inbox is a default catchall for tasks without a project. The Today view shows all tasks **due today**, and the Upcoming view allows you to **plan ahead**. You can switch between **list and board views** in the Upcoming section.
* 📱 Todoist has award-winning mobile apps for iOS and Android. A handy feature is the **Quick Add widget**, which allows you to **add tasks on the fly** by typing or dictating them into your phone.
* 🔔 "The best system for using Todoist is the one that you'll actually stick with. **Habits are easier to create when they're simple and easy to do**."

Hi, I'm Becky from Todoist, and in this video, I'm going to walk you through how to get started with a brand new Todoist account. Now, whether you're feeling completely overwhelmed by your to-do list, or maybe you just want to get that much more organized, you have come to the right place. So let's get started. The first thing you're going to want to do is create a free Todoist account, if you haven't already. So just head over to Todoist.com and click start for free. You'll see here you have options to use the Google, Facebook, or Apple logins. That's quick and easy. And then you don't have to remember an extra password. But you can also use your email and password. I'm going to do that. Todoist will walk you through a really short onboarding flow to set up your profile and customize your account a little bit. So I'm going to add my name here.

Uploading your photo is optional, but I think it's nice if you want to use Todoist with your team. You can toggle this option on, and that will just create a team workspace in your account, in addition to your personal workspace, so that you can collaborate on projects, share tasks, that kind of thing. But for now, we're just going to keep this super simple and focus on Todoist for personal use. So then I'll click continue. Now how do you plan to use Todoist? I want to use Todoist for personal and work things because I don't have the time or patience to be checking multiple apps for all of my tasks every day. You probably don't either. So I will select those two options and then click Launch Todoist. Once you've created your account, you'll land in your Today view, which we'll talk more about later. You'll see that there are these short tooltips here that you can read and dismiss, just to get you oriented with the app.

You'll also see that there are some tasks and projects here already, just to help you get started, but you'll probably want to create some of your own. So the first thing I'm going to show you how to do is create a project. Projects are buckets that group related tasks together. It's a lot easier to organize your tasks than in one long list. So to create your first project, just come over to your sidebar and click the plus icon. Select Add Project. You can give your project a name. I'm going to call this one Life Admin. It's a project I use myself all the time for those little tasks that crop up every day, week, month. They're super easy to forget, but often have consequences when you don't do them. So I want to make sure I'm on top of them. You can give your project a color just to make it stand out on your list. I like teal.

The workspace field here is for
if you are using your Todoist with your team. You can see that here,
it's just my projects, but if I had a team workspace,
that would show up here and I could choose whether to share this project
with my whole team or keep it private to myself. Now, this is a project I'm
probably going to reference quite a bit, so I'm going to add it to my favorites,
and you'll see what that means in just a moment. And last but not least,
you can decide how you want to view your project,
whether it's a traditional list or a board,
which organizes your tasks into columns. And if you're on a Pro plan,
you can also choose to view your project as a calendar. You can change your layout at any time,
even after you've created your project. It won't affect your existing tasks at all, so there's really
no need to overthink it at this point.

I'm just going to keep it
as a traditional list and click add. Okay. You can see my new project
here is ready for tasks. I can click Add task here,
and that will work just fine. But it's a little bit faster
to use the keyboard shortcut Q, and that will pull up
the quick add menu here. And I'll name my task. Something I forget to do all the time is to give my dogs their flea
and tick preventative. So I want to make sure
I remember to do that. So I'll say give Wally and Grizzly their meds, and I want this
task to show up in my today view on the day I want to do it,
so I'm going to give it a due date. This is where Todoist gets very cool. I could click due date here,
use one of these shortcuts, or scroll down
for any date on the calendar. But that's pretty slow. It involves several clicks, scrolling.

I'm pretty lazy. If a task takes me more than a couple of seconds to add it,
I'm just not going to do it. So instead, I'm going to click here
in the task field and just type in my due date as if I were saying it out
loud to someone. So I can do it today, and Todoist
will recognize that it's a due date. It will highlight
it and add it to the task. Now Todoist recognizes
a lot of different dates. You can do tomorrow, Wednesday, next Wednesday. You can set it for a specific date
like June 3rd. You can say in five years
if you really want to plan ahead. Todoist will recognize all of them
and add it accordingly. So I'm going to go back to today. I will click Add task and you can see that
the due date got added here. And now when I go to my today view,
I can see that

that task has been added to my list there,
so I won't forget to do it. But that is just the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to due dates in Todoist. Now, a due date
like today is a one and done kind of due date, so when I complete this
task, it completes it forever. Oh, and you get confetti
when you complete your first task. But of course, giving Wally and Grizzly their Heartgard and flea
and tick preventative, all of that, it's something I have to remember
to do every single month. So instead of adding that task again for every single month,
I can add a recurring due date, something like monthly. You can set it for weekly. You can say every two weeks, you can say every January 1st. All those things Todoist will recognize. So I'm going to go back to monthly
and click save. And you'll see that
the task is still due for today.

But now it has this little recurring icon. And so when I go over here,
and complete the task, instead of completing it forever,
it just resets it for the next instance. So now when I go to my today view
on June 22nd, I'm going to see this task, and I'm going to remember to do it,
which is really cool. Recurring due dates are great for things
like remembering to prepare monthly reports at work,
remembering to put out the trash every week, remembering to send mom a card
on her birthday every year. And the great thing about them
is that you can just add your task and completely forget about it,
because you know that it will show up on the right day for you to do it,
which just frees up a ton of mental space for you to focus on what
you need to do right now. As a naturally forgetful person myself, trust me when I tell you that recurring due dates
will not only give you peace of mind.

but staying on top of all of those
little things every week, every month, every quarter is going to make
you look like an absolute genius at work, and the world's best daughter. If you visit our help center
and search for due dates, I'll actually include
a link in the description below. You will find a bunch of different
examples of due dates that Todoist recognizes, but I encourage you
to just play around with it yourself. The chances are that
if there's a date that you want to set a task for,
Todoist will be able to recognize it. Once you get tasks and due dates, you know 80% of what
you need to know about Todoist. But if you want to stick around,
there are a few more key features that I will walk you through. So if you click on a task here
to open up the Task Details view, you'll notice that there is an option here
to add a subtask.

Giving Wally and Grizzly their meds,
that's a pretty simple task. So let's use a more complicated example like filing my taxes. I don't know what this process is like in your country,
but in the United States where I am, this is an awful, awful process,
so complicated. I put it off every year and every year
it's super stressful. So instead, this year
I'm going to use subtasks to break this task down into smaller,
more manageable steps. So I need to find my W-2, find my 1099, find my mortgage interest statement, find my rental income and expenses, etc. you get the idea. Okay, so now instead of starting my day
having to file my taxes, which is this huge anxiety
inducing task for me, I know that I just have to find my W-2s,
which is a lot more manageable, easy to get started on,
and because I have every step listed out,

I can be confident
that I'm not missing anything important. But here's the best part. I'm going to make this a recurring task every February 1st to get it done
nice and early. Okay, so say it's February 1st, 2025. I'm going to complete my subtasks. Boom, boom, boom. Oh, great. Todoist says I've got my daily goal. I'm feeling great. When I'm ready to complete my parent task, I can go up to this three-dot icon here and I have these three options. If I select Complete and reset tasks, it will reset the task
for the following year, and it will reset all the subtasks
so they're all ready to go the next time I need to do this task. When you go back to your project view,
you'll see your subtasks nestled underneath your parent task here, and you can always collapse them here
if you don't want to see them.

Okay, before we move on from projects, I just want to show you one more handy
feature for adding a little bit more structure and organization,
which is sections. If you hover underneath your project list,
you'll see the option to add a section. Now, for this one, I might do dogs,
I might do finances. I'll add a section
for cleaning, all the fun stuff. And now when I look at my project, it's
not just one long list, it's
broken out into these different sections. I can add a task directly to the section
by clicking here, or I can drag existing
tasks into sections to reorganize them. Okay, so you know projects. You know tasks, you know due dates. Now let's run
through some of the important task views in your sidebar
that you may be spending a lot of time in. To start out, let's go to the inbox. You can think of your inbox
as a default catchall

for any tasks that don't have a project. Like I said before, I'm pretty lazy. If it takes me a long time to add a task,
I'm just not going to do it. So instead of adding tasks to projects,
I will often just add them right to the inbox on the fly and then come back
to reorganize them later. And to reorganize them,
all you have to do is drag a task into any project, just like that. Next up is the Today view. Now this will show you
all of your tasks that are due today. Now I spend 90% of my time in Todoist in this view, because these are the tasks
that I need to focus on right now. I don't want to see
all of those other tasks, so I will actually click
on this little icon here and close the sidebar. So I have a really clean, focused list
of what I need to get done today. You can complete tasks from here.

and once they're all gone, you'll get this nice Todoist Zero celebration. When you don't get all of your tasks done for the day, you can just drag and drop a task here to reschedule it for tomorrow. Now there is no shame in postponing tasks for the next day. Everyone does it. We encourage you to do it. Mentally, it is so much easier to postpone those tasks and end the day with an empty To-Do list than it is to let those overdue tasks pile up day after day. Last but not least, is your upcoming view. Now, this is where you can really go into planning mode for your week, your month, your year. If you like to plan that far ahead, I'm going to go ahead and click on the rectangle icon again to close the sidebar so we can focus on this view. You'll see that upcoming is set to Board view by default. Each task has a card and each column represents a date.

You can drag your tasks between columns to change their due date, so it's really nice for just organizing your week. Reorder organizing it when you need to. You can click on this arrow here to jump ahead, and then click today to come right back to the current week. You can also click on the month and year over here and scroll down to click any date in the future, and you can pull it up there. Again, click today to come back. If you don't like board view, that's totally fair. It's an acquired taste. You can click on view in the upper right and switch your layout to the list. Now you'll see all the same information in this infinitely scrollable list. You can click on today to go back to the present, just like you could before, and you can drag and drop to reschedule tasks as well. Now you'll also notice that there's a calendar here. If you're on the Pro or Business plan, you can also choose to see

your upcoming tasks in a calendar view. In this video,
I've focused mostly on the web app, but of course life is not lived
in front of one's computer. The best thing about Todoist is that we have award-winning apps for iOS and Android. I highly recommend
that you download them to your phone so that you can add tasks,
do tasks, complete tasks, do everything that I showed you here
in this video from your phone as well. There's so much our mobile
apps can do that I can't get into all of the functionality here, but
I do want to walk you through my absolute favorite feature, something I use
multiple times a day, every day. I think everyone should use it,
and that is our Quick Add widget. It's so handy for adding tasks on the fly when I'm out and about living life,
so that I don't forget them. Now I'm going to show you
how to add the widget to your phone.

using the iOS app,
but I will link to the instructions on how to do it
in Android in the description below. First, go to the App Store, find Todoist,
download it on your phone. It's free, and make sure that you sign in
with the same account that you used to sign up for the web app, because that will make sure
that your tasks are syncing between your computer and your phone,
and you can complete them, add them, and any changes you make
will be reflected in both places. Once you've got Todoist on your phone,
go to your lock screen and long press, then tap customize. Tap lock screen. Tap add widget. Find the Todoist widget and the menu that pops up and tap on it. Then close the widget screen. Tap done. And now when you open your lock screen,
the Quick Add widget will be right there. So whenever you think of a task,
just tap on the widget and it will open up a new task.

In Todoist,
you can type your task in there along with the due date,
just like we did on the web app. But even faster,
you can dictate it into your phone. So just tap on the microphone. Email Thando about that thing tomorrow. Tap on the microphone again
so that it stops listening to you, and you'll see that
Todoist recognized tomorrow as a due date and added it. So when I tap the arrow to save, you'll see the task in my inbox
with the due date for tomorrow,
and this will also show up in my web app. Okay, we covered a lot of ground in this video. There is so much more that Todoist can do,
but I recommend to new Todoisters not to get distracted
by all the bells and whistles. The best system for using Todoist
is the one that you'll actually stick with, and habits are just easier to create
when they're simple and easy to do.

Todoist does not need to be complicated. If you don't believe me,
I'm going to link to Todoist’s CEO’s super simple Todoist setup above,
so you can see for yourself. You can always add more things in later. If you run into any issues at all, the
Todoist Help Center is a great resource. If you can't find the answer
to your question there, our Support team is awesome. You can always reach out to them. I'm so excited that you've found Todoist,
and you are taking these first steps to getting a little less stressed, a little more organized,
and hopefully feeling a little bit more capable of taking on
whatever it is that you want to take on. I cannot
thank you enough for letting me be a small part of it,
and I wish you the best of luck.

Getting Started with Todoist

Todoist is the to-do list & task manager to organize your life and work.

Regain clarity and calmness by getting tasks out of your head and into Todoist, no matter where you are or what device you use. It's a simple yet powerful to-do list app ranked best-in-class by Apple, Google, The Verge, Forbes, and more. Over 35+ million people have used Todoist to organize work and life, completing more than two billion tasks along the way. 

It's free to use. Sign up here: https://todoist.com

Todoist

Getting Started with Todoist: A Step-by-Step Guide

To begin, create a free Todoist account on the website using Google, Facebook, Apple, or email login.

Customize your profile and choose whether to use Todoist for personal tasks, work tasks, or both.

When using Todoist, you can create projects to organize related tasks, choose a color for each project, and decide whether to keep it private or share it with a team.

Using the keyboard shortcut "Q" allows for quickly adding tasks in Todoist.

The app's natural language processing recognizes a variety of date inputs, such as specific dates, days of the week, and relative terms like "tomorrow" or "next Wednesday.

" Todoist also enables the creation of recurring due dates, such as monthly or weekly tasks, streamlining task management and organization.

The Benefits of Recurring Due Dates in Todoist

Recurring due dates in Todoist help users remember and stay on top of important tasks, freeing up mental space.

They are especially useful for those who are forgetful and can make users more organized and productive.

Todoist also offers the option to add subtasks, allowing users to break down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.

Using Todoist, you can set recurring tasks to be completed annually, easily reset subtasks, and organize them into sections for better structure.

The inbox serves as a catch-all for tasks without a project, while the Today view allows you to focus on tasks due on the current day, providing a clean and focused list for the day's priorities.

Mastering Todoist: A Guide to Maximizing Productivity

Todoist Zero celebration allows for easy rescheduling of unfinished tasks without shame, promoting a clear to-do list.

The upcoming view in Todoist offers a versatile planning mode, allowing users to organize tasks by date and easily switch between board view and list view.

Todoist's award-winning mobile apps, including the Quick Add widget, provide additional functionality for adding and managing tasks on the go.

To use Todoist on your iOS device, download the app from the App Store and sign in with your web app account to sync your tasks.

Add the Todoist widget to your lock screen for quick task creation.

Keep your Todoist system simple and check out the CEO's simple setup for guidance.

If needed, the Todoist Help Center and Support team are available for assistance.