Using Todoist to get a busy week under control

Too many tasks to manage

This week has been a hectic one with my dear wife out of town on vacation and the overlapping activites of sports and work between the two teens at home taking their toll on my organizational systems. Coupled with my day job I found this week to be a bit more than I expected on the weekly stress scale. To the rescue...Todoist.I needed a way to capture all the individual tasks needed to be done this week. Part of the issue was the tasks were coming fast and furious and capturing them included not on the task to be done but when it needed to be executed. Using my normal tools for this (OneNote, Workflowy, Google Keep) worked with various levels of success, but none of them did the complete job. It was at this point I went back through the archives and decided to give Todoist another try.

Speaking plain English to Todoist

One of the key features of Todoist is its "natural language" method of capturing and organizing tasks. Here's an example:

Take out the trash today 8pm #chores @ian

In Todoist, that translates to a task that is automatically set with a reminder for 8pm today, added to the Chores project, and labeled with my son's name (so I can look at the label in the app and immediately know what chores he needs to do today). By using this natual language formatting for the tasks, reminders, projects, and labels I have been able to bulk capture tasks as they come up with no secondary processing necessary.Using the widget is a simple matter to be able to capture the tasks in a format where they are are already organized and ready to be acted upon. The application is much more powerful than just this feature but for now this is making a huge difference for me this week. We'll see if it holds up over time but I have high hopes that my system may have evolved to be able to leverage Todoist more fully.