Why I Use Todoist to Keep Myself on Track With My Goals

Today is a very hectic world in which everything from social media to the mundane chores of life fight for your attention. It is too easy to lose focus and fail to stay on target. Todoist lets you fight the constant bombardment of information and things that demand your attention. (By the way, this post was not sponsored by Todoist, I simply get a lot of value from it and want to show how you can too!)

You decide what is important and then mark those tasks off when they’re done. Moreover, if you didn’t get one done, then you can reschedule it for the next day and flag it as a higher priority.

These are the three reasons why Todoist is my go-to app for productivity.

1. A Single Place for All of Your Personal and Work Reminders
One reason why I really like using Todoist is that it’s one place for everything. It’s a single place to keep all of your reminders, so you don’t forget anything. And trust me, with all of the information being thrown at us every day, it is easy to forget things.

Think about when you go grocery shopping, and you don’t recall everything that you needed to get. Or think about when there was that one pressing task at work, but it slipped your mind due to the bombardment of emails and other pressing demands. Todoist allows you to keep track of everything and set reminders too. 

In fact, it is pretty intuitive. When you add a new task to Todoist, you just type the name of the task and then the due date and if it is recurring. For example, typing “Send Web Traffic Report daily” will create a recurring daily task to “Send Web Traffic Report.”

2. You Can Organize Notes by Projects and Sections
This is a very useful feature in Todoist that makes it easy to get organized. For instance, you can have a Project for all of your grocery items, for friend’s birthdays, or all of the things you have due at work. The nice thing about having different categories is that it lets you easily track all the stuff that you have to get done, even if it’s in the far future, such as taxes or your annual medical exam. 

Moreover, using Sections within Projects is also very helpful to further organize your thoughts and tasks. For example, for me, I have a morning routine, a midday routine, and an evening routine. All three of these Projects have Sections within them where I have listed out all the different stuff that I want to get done, including important habits such as reading the Bible or exercising. You can also organize your Sections chronologically or by theme. For example, I have a Project for books which has Sections to track what I have read each year along with what books I’d like to read next.

3. You Won’t Forget Any Thought or Stray Link
Because you can create any project you want, and because Todoist comes with a built-in “Inbox” Project, you can just put anything in to sort later. This allows you to avoid the problem of forgetting that one inspirational idea you had, or that one op-ed that you wanted to come back to and share. 

You can also keep notes on lessons learned as you try to be more productive or build new habits. For instance, although it is kind of meta, I like having Projects for my productivity systems and for future improvements. This allows me to take notes about how to become even better at using Todoist and at achieving my goals. Again, since this information is all in one project, I can come back to these thoughts every quarter or so and make any needed changes.

Finally, because we’re young professionals, you can also have a project dedicated to networking. You can even list people you need to periodically reach out to and set recurring reminders so you don’t forget. All of this is very helpful if you are really busy and are prone to forgetting small things that are important but not pressing.

Pick a Tool, Any Tool
Ultimately, you can use any tool that you’re comfortable with. Todoist is just one of many services out there. But, unless you have a very powerful attention span, having some way of organizing and keeping track of all the things that you need to do is vital if you want to succeed.