Tasks made easy: the smart Todoist in the Apptest

Mine appeared a few months ago Apptest to Wunderlist, which is a pretty basic task manager. I've now ventured into new territory and Todoist is offprobeers. My app test.

Disclaimer: I bought Todoist Premium myself for test purposes and private purposes. This article is not affiliated with Todoist.

Design and construction

Todoist is available for different platforms, which is why the design is a bit different everywhere. The structure, however, is always the same. For this report I will refer to the web version and the Android app, but also briefly mention the browser extension for Chrome.

When you open the app, you land on your home page. This can be either the inbox, the view with today's tasks, the view with tasks for the next seven days, or a specific project. The user can choose this in the settings. No matter where you come from, your tasks are displayed in a list. In the web version, there is a checkbox for each task, whereas on Android you have to swipe a task to the right when you have completed it.

Additionally, for a task you can see the due date and time, which appears red if it is exceeded, the priority that can be assigned to a task, the labels assigned to the task and the associated project.

The left sidebar, which can be expanded on Android, contains the menu and an overview of your projects, labels and filters. If a project, label or filter is particularly important, you can pin it directly under the top three entries in the sidebar.

This is what the list of tasks looks like in Todoist (screenshot: TechnikNews, 2018)

Projects

Projects in Todoist are what notebooks are in OneNote or Evernote. You can create as many of them as you like and, in addition to your own name, you can also add one of 22 colors as a label. If you want, you can add emojis using the operating system's keyboard, as I did. You can also add subtitles to projects.proprojects. This can be done by dragging a project to the right in the list so that a small indentation is created.

labels

Labels are a premium feature of Todoist. They allow you to bundle similar tasks across multiple projects in one place so that you can find them quickly. For example, you can label all tasks that require your laptop. @Laptop mark. Or all of the tasks that you have to do at home can be included @At home As with projects, a label can be assigned one of 13 colors.

Filter

Filters make it possible to filter certain tasks according to user-defined criteria, which the name suggests. Let me explain the whole thing in more detail with an example: I have a filter that Homework today called. As a criterion I have today & @ homework chosen. This means that this filter shows me all the tasks that are due today and the label Homework got. In short: all the homework that still needs to be done today.

Dennis Vitt wrote a complete article on the filter function on his website. You can find this here.

This is my filter for homework that I still have to do (screenshot: TechnikNews, 2018)

Another example would be a filter with the criterion (overdue | today) & #work. This would then display all ToDo tasks that are overdue or due today and are in the project Work are located. However, I noticed that it takes some time to recognize the possibilities of this feature, which makes it all the more useful.

Creating tasks

There are several ways to add tasks and tasks to Todoist. On Android, for example, you have the option of activating the Quick Tile in the notification center so that you don't even have to open the app. Tasks can also be added via integrations, such as the Slack integration or the Google Calendar. I will come back to integrations in more detail later.

In the web version or in the app on Android you can simply use the plus icon as normal. The practical thing is that you don't have to specify all the details manually when creating, i.e. you can very easily Tidy the room on Monday at 15:00 p.m. #Private @todo enter the task clean up the room due on Monday at 15:00 in the project Private with the label To do is created.

I also find it helpful that you can write individual words in a task in bold. To do this, you simply have to put two callsigns to the right and left of the desired word. What is worth mentioning for Apple users is that tasks can also be created using Siri.

Interact with tasks

In Todoist, you have quite a few options for interacting with your tasks. One thing I have rarely used is drag & drop to move tasks from project to project. Rather, I have used it to organize tasks within a project. What makes organizing tasks much easier in my opinion are headers, which remove unnecessary subheadings.proavoid projects. This is created by putting a colon at the end of a new task.

If you have not yet assigned an exact date to your task, you can do this with Smart Schedule. I have never used this, however, as I have always planned my to-dos immediately.

This is what the extension for the Chrome browser looks like (screenshot: TechnikNews, 2018)

Another handy way to interact with your tasks is through the Chrome Extension. This not only enables the creation of new tasks, no, it even offers the entire Todoist experience of the web app in a fairly small space. I didn't notice any Todoist feature that isn't also available in the extension.

Integrations

Todoist offers APIs for developers and other services, i.e. developer interfaces, so that these integrations for the ToDo Manager procan grammer I've only checked out the Google Calendar integration so farprobet and those for Slack.

With the Google Calendar, all tasks are synchronized with your own planner. You can then move them, delete them and even create new ones. All changes are always compared with Todoist.

The integration for Slack is not as extensive as that for the calendar. With the command / todoist you can easily create tasks that will then be displayed in the desired project with the desired labels.