Even though I now entrust my frivolous [and not so frivolous] tasks to the almighty Google, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Todoist. It’s simple, clean and does nesting tasks extraordinarily well. Take a look at the input:
Todoist Input
So the box that says “History” followed by secret code is the main box you work out of. “History” would be the task name while @hw is the context (familiar for all you GTDers out there). !p1 indicated the task is priority one, the highest on a scale of 1-4. In the date box we have “ev day @23″. Todoist runs on a 24 hour clock or a 12 hour clock with appropriate AM or PM. I simply find it easier to translate into what my family calls “army time” to save myself extra key strokes. Anyway, the “ev day” part indicates this task is due every day and the “@23″ shows that the due time is 23:00, or 11:00 pm. The arrows on the right side of the main box are used for indenting the tasks; nesting tasks is something that Todoist does extremely well.
Here’s a shot of how the task shows up once created [pardon the 2 different style - the first screen shot is a rather old one taken on Firefox 2 in Vista while this one is a Firefox 3 screenshot in Ubuntu using the Mac4Lin theme.
Created Task
As you can see, the context “hw” turns green, the priority one turns the task name red, and the task is due tomorrow at 11:00pm (I took the screenshot after 11 otherwise it would say today at 11:00pm) The circling arrows on the due date indicate a repeating task.
Additionally, Todoist can feature many projects:
Projects Menu
You can color code them and nest them and reorder them to your liking. The number of tasks is shown in the box next to the project name for a quick assessment.
This bar:
Query Bar
I call the “Query Bar”. You can enter search terms, in this case tasks due in the next 7 days or overdue. You can also see the number of tasks due today, with the red box indicating overdue tasks.
That’s all for today folks, but I’ll leave you with this:
I found Todoist to be remarkably intuitive. There are a number of keyboard shortcuts nicely detailed in the pages “Todoist Help” section, along with some other neatness. If you want a no frills, straightforward task manager with some happy surprises thrown in, check out Todoist.
