WARNING! Todoist Is Not A Project Manager
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
- When you try to use Todoist (a task manager) as a project manager all you end up doing is inviting overwhelm, stress and a lot of rescheduling. Here’s what to do instead
Sign up for Todoist for FREE here
bit.ly/2XeWu8H
SUMMER OFFER
AND... For August only, if you join Todoist with the above link, you can go to todo.ist/33lDR7F and use the coupon code "TDSummer" and you will get 2 months FREE premium.
Thank you for taking the time to watch this video. If you feel you got some benefit from this video, please share it so others can get to share in the knowledge. If you want to learn more about how I can help you with your own productivity and goals, visit my website - www.carlpullein... - where you will find more resources on becoming more productive and creating an amazing life for yourself.
NEW!
The Time Sector Course
The Revolutionary New Time Management System
After a year of research and six months of development, the Time Sector Course is now available. Learn how to create a time management system designed for the 21st century.
carl-pullein.t...
Here’s how I manage my email
• Why I've Gone Back To ...
Get yourself enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide To C.O.D online course and start using my simple to create, easy to maintain, complete productivity system.
bit.ly/2rC0rFd
My purpose in making these videos is to help as many people as I can to become better organised and more productive so I can contribute to reducing the epidemic levels of workplace stress in the world.
Visit my Websites:
www.carlpullein...
carl-pullein.t...
The Working With Podcast:
www.carlpullein...
Sign up for The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
eepurl.com/cOAmvz
Follow me @:
Facebook: bit.ly/2nyurQA
Twitter: / carl_pullein
Linkedin: / carlpullein
Instagram: / carl_pullein
Email me: carl@carlpullein.com
My books can be viewed here: www.carlpullein...
#TimeManagement #Todoist #Productivity
I didn't even realize you could create a linked task... I've been putting my links in the comments. Thanks for this!
Well said - I too see the same problem occurring in a variety of forums - It might be good for some people with very basic tasks in a very simple project - but you need something more involved to keep track of projects - Evernote, OneNote, Notion, etc. Send the reminders to work on specific project tasks out to your task application, but get that project organized within something better than a task list!
Completely agree with you there :-)
This is completely true. Personally I find excel is a simple compromise if you haven't anything better because I can write notes, draw diagrams and pictures, mock up gantt charts, have action lists, contacts and many other things all in one place.
I work in software and I am looking forward to seeing todoist boards because kanban boards are becoming popular to manage simple processing-type projects and it could really work well.
MeisterTask is my solution for that! I can do it all (almost). I just open the project I'm working on (let's say a new real estate listing) and have the checklist of things to do for that project and go through them. I move the project around to different 'boards' as I complete certain checklists so I can always see where it is in the pipeline. New listings have a nice pipeline (inbox, in progress, review, revise, approved, add online, completed). They all have tag/label, and checklist automations set up for each 'board/column' and as the project gets moved around I can see a quick visual cue of what's happening. I can leave myself notes and reminders so I know if I skipped something and why. My checklists are my individual tasks, but I don't need to see them as such, I just need to keep track of the overall big picture....as explained at the end of my novel here.
I don't have a formal structure for my job. Things just need to get done, new listings are always the top priority. I have 2 weekly tasks to do that I set up as a recurring task and do it when the notification is sent to me. I'm lucky to be able to pick whatever I want and just work on it as needed. I do keep a general weekly checklist of things I'm working on, they get crossed off as done, and new ones added so I have a general idea of everything going on. Any specifics are within my projects.
All that being said I use this exclusively for work. My personal life is SO boring I don't even need a sticky note to keep track of anything. :D
I've been back & forth with Todoist for a few years now usually ending up in exactly the situation you describe. I finally realised this problem a few months ago and by the time I'd put all my project ToDos back into Evernote, I found I didn't really need Todoist after all. The Evernote reminders work well enough with a few, well crafted, saved searches!
Glad you finally found a system, Graham.
I use Notion as my project manager, as it's easy to create different views and the like. I then link the project page, to a task (in Todoist) to remind me of what I need to do next... so now I have just six 'projects' in Todoist!
I do use Evernote though, as my GTD capture app.
Sounds like a solid system to me, Toran.
@@Carl_Pullein ta :-)
Hi, just starting move some ToDoist projects to Notion. ToDoist is missing quite a lot features to use it as PM (due dates, task status, reasonable print output, etc.) But no way I will move from ToDoist - its features like recurring, quick task add, etc, are unique for me
V. Pfeffer yup, I will still use Todoist for personal, recurring and sub tasks...
Another excellent video. I consider myself a fairly proficient Todoist user, but it seems like I learn something new every time I watch your videos. Today's a-ha moment was your demo of the task name format of URL-Space-OpenParenthesis-TaskTitle-EndParenthesis to make the task name clickable. Up until now, I've been creating comments and putting the external link there, but this is so much cleaner and more efficient. Brilliant, Carl! Keep these tips coming. Cheers!
Happy to help, Mark.
once again I'm here thanking you.
Glad you liked it.
This is a very helpful reminder. I've ditched Todoist for any work activities but I still use it all the time for personal activities and recurring reminders for things around the house (water the plants, pay the bills, order xxx from amazon). So I still find Todoist very helpful for those types of things but not in a work or project management capacity.
It does that kind of work remarkably well
Carl, this video helps a lot. Thank you!
You're very welcome!
Total A-HA moment Carl! You described exactly the situation in which I find myself - overwhelmed with the number of Todoist items I have and how to organize, re-organize, and re-re-organize them. I'm spending this cloudy summer day applying this new knowledge to my system. I'm energized and excited to do it! Thanks for this early Sunday morning inspiration!
P.S. One of the projects on my new simplified list is to finish your "Time Sector" course, which, ironically, I haven't made time to do.
Enjoy the system reset, Mike. You'll find things are much faster once you shift things over.
@@Carl_Pullein I once said something that my boss and I both found profound enough to write down. "Change is always a good thing, even if the outcome is to find out you were doing it better before." Good tagline if I ever write a book.
@@baconmike67 I like that. It's so true.
This is a game changer - Two weeks ago a dumped Todoist for a spreadsheet to track my projects and multi step tasks for me and my team. This is the lens I should have seen it through.... Now get the boards in English and we can talk....
Hahaha, glad you found it eye opening, Kurt.
Although your videos always give me some new ideas on how to organize myself I cannot agree to your point here.
If Todoist is a project manager or not (or better: a project management tool) depends on your personal preferences and the scope of business you are managing with this tool.
Me for example, I want to have everything in one place and not in several different places (tools).
As a manager of a business with 900 employees, 10 department heads as directs and a lot of peers etc. Todoist is my one and only tool for managing everything that is going on.
My own tasks, projects, delegated tasks (collaboration) and so on. Additionally I am also the VP of an NGO where I have also a large number of tasks to manage.
I use heavily the sections to break down my projects, tags, priorities, e-mail-to-project function, filters. All that stuff. And meanwhile I will also use the new boards view for some projects.
The problem with your video's as well as also with a lot of other Todoist-Video's on TH-cam is always that my scope of business operations is more than 10x larger than all the examples I've ever seen.
Hi Thomas, as long as it works for you, that's really all that matters. I've never had any luck using a to-do list manager as a project manager and working with a lot of my clients it's the one area I have found causes so many problems, overwhelm and missed tasks.
Is that Pampa del Leoncito in the background?
I literally asked myself this question last week. Why was I experiencing such disconnect between my tasks and projects? Why was it so hard to plan them? - Thank you for your thoughts about this, I'm going to start making my project plans in Notes and try to keep that up with my weekly review.
Good luck, Sander. Once you've made the transition you'll find things become much clearer.
Thank you carl
I am really excited about your approach decoupling PM of TM. What I still don't get is your approach using a Note App like Evernote for the PM. Honestly I don't see how that particular type of note-taking app works with the majority of PM oriented activities. I can understand how is likely working on your type of projects. For other type of Projects, a PM-dedicated tool might be more suitable. (such as Asana, Azure DevOps, Notion?). Even I am using Obsidian (local note-taking graph-based app), I cannot use it for a consistent PM tool. I need something more table-based (Notion or even a simple Spreadsheet) rather than a plain text body structured tools. I know it is very personal, and we should use what works for us, but the purpose of following experts like you is to avoid inventing the wheel whatever we do, isn't it? :) Thanks for sharing!
Hi David, The tables in Evernote make it an outstanding project manager for the types of projects I do. My projects are generally solo projects not involving teams of people. If I were involved in a team, I would want to be working with a dedicated PM as we would need to know where each element of the project is.
That said, I recently completed a full house move project with my wife and parents-in-law and we all shared an Apple Notes folder. It was brilliant. We had a dedicated note for checklists--things to buy etc, and who was responsible, we had the images of the house before we moved in, and we stored the measurements there, too, so when my wife and mother-in-law were buying furniture, they had everything to hand.
@@Carl_Pullein Thanks, Carl. I think it is just that type of fear of missing a filtering or tracking feature, especially if you are also involved working in highly parametrized environments (such us ERP, etc...). I'll give it a try!
This is a very useful reminder. Thanks!
The struggle for me is how to best organise the project information in the notes app (Evernote in my private life, OneNote at work). Especially when a project becomes bigger and is spread over a long time. Would you have any videos on that aspect?
That's a difficult one to do because everyone's long projects will be different and have so many different inputs. I'll see what I can do, but no promises.
Great video. I do a similar thing with a project plan on a single file/note. At the moment I'm beginning to find that I don't really need todoist as much because I schedule time to work on a project and I can work straight out of my plan. I also noticed you let slip that you use Evernote for this in your real life work. I thought you'd left Evernote for Apple notes, or are you using both?
Ah, Evernote is my workhorse. Its's so robust and reliable. Apple Notes is for quick notes on my iOS devices--that's where Evernote is very weak at the moment.
I feel like this is very useful when your way of organazing work is with very few and important projects that you can link to a few tasks in Todoist, but if you're used to break any activity into a number of tasks that make up a project then it would be overwhelming to have so many projects in a different application/program. Because of that way of organizing a lot of people could have lots of projects, and I feel that having more than 20 projects in your notes/excel app is going to confuse you rather than help you simplify.
Fair point, Jorge. However, what it really boils down to is how many projects can you keep up in the air at any one time. In my experience both in the corporate world with hundreds of ongoing projects and in my current life where I get to choose what I work on, it really doesn't matter how many projects you have, you can only work on so many at a time and that's why I much prefer to keep all that in my notes app so my task manager can focus on the projects I am working on right now.
Thanks Carl very informative
Oh WOW this is a game changer for how I think about ToDoist!
You're welcome.
My biggest issie is with structuring project management vs. keeping a to do list.. I wish you could bring up a calendar in TD where you could drag tasks on it vs. linking to Google calendar. That has never worked for me.
Whenever I've tested apps that allow this, I've found it to be useless. Unless you live a nomadic life where no other human has any connection to you, scheduling tasks to be done at specific times or rigidly assigning dates to a task is never going to work. There are far too many variables in the day for that to work.
James bond characters thing does amuse me!,
Imay have to rethink my projects perhaps I am trying to make them too complicated!
I often put links in the comments box, for example, I have a holiday task of review holiday video with a link to episode 185!
I find the sinker the project structure, the quicker I am at getting tasks complete as I have less choices.
So you keep a master list of projects in Evernote, then just link next actions to your Todoist? I'm trying to figure this out, because I'm trying to decide between Omnifocus (that has defer AND due dates) and TickTick (I'm not overfond of the look of Todoist is the only reason it's not on the table as a choice). I would like to be able to set up a filter (or something similar) for things I can do RIGHT NOW. Say I have 10 minutes of free time--what can be done in that 10 minutes. (I hope that makes sense!) As an aside...apparently I'm super in love with my parenthesis key...
Paren Love - Still with it! Rori, after years of bouncing from one app solution to another because the new one has one more Bell or Whistle than the one I was using. Switching to the new solution requires a few weeks to learn the basics. After, another six months to learn and apply the not so obvious nuances that really boost your productivity. By this point, the next "New Thing" is released. It looks promising, so you check it out - after all how else will you know if it works! I did this for too many years. I can assure you Rori, there are no "Holy Grail" apps. YOU are the Holy Grail! All you need do is pick one or one set of solutions (example "Todoist & Google Suite" or TickTick and Notion). After, make a commitment to work with only the set you have chosen. Ignore any new product releases. "Working only with" means taking a deep dive into learning all the features, techniques and tricks of your chosen set. Over time you will realize a tremendous savings of time and a robust, reliable rate of productivity. If you have somehow chosen the wrong solution set, you will know it fairly early in the process which case you adopt another solution set. Chances are this will never happen. Good luck!
@@malcolmstephenson556 This. Is very good advice. Thank you!!
You can always use labels, contexts or perspectives (in OmniFocus) for your less than 10 minute tasks. I've tried these in the past, but when I find myself with ten spare minutes I now prefer to just relax and take in the scenery. ;-)
@@Carl_Pullein Ha! Probably a better idea :)
Interesting video. Thanks.
I would be interested to hear how you capture tasks on the go for your projects while not specifically working in the project. Notes applications is not optimized to quickly add a task to a project without navigating the notes. Do you have an inbox in your note application or other ?
I am asking because I capture those tasks in Todoist.
Hi Clément, a task is still a task and a note is still a note. So if it’s a task it goes in to Todoist. If it’s a note or an idea for a project or even something that needs developing, it goes in to Evernote.
Thanks for the answer so you still put the tasks in Todoist.
With the example it looks like we have only the placeholder task in Todoist such as Working on the project A and then the actual tasks to follow are in notes.
Carl. Now that ToDoist has boards in beta does that change your thinking around project support or just refine simple todo's?
I've been looking at it over the weekend to see how it could change my workflow, and so far it doesn't. I have a specific use case for Asana, and Todoist boards do not have any of the features I use in Asana. So, really at the moment, it's just another way to look at my tasks.
@@Carl_Pullein totally agreed - just a different task view (nice one), but managing projects should be elsewhere - ToDoist is missing a lot of project attributes to cover and completed tasks are not visible at first sight.
I know this is sort of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but THANK YOU for getting rid of your intro. Seriously, THANK YOU. (Video intros are one of my biggest pet peeves. If you already subscribe to someone, they're just time wasters.)
Always looking at ways of improving my videos, Rori.
Hmm, that's interesting... Can you say or write more about this...? Are projects, from GTD method, are useless at all? What's mean that your system differents from GTD by context - so you have timebox-es instead project list?
Yes. GTD manages to-do by place, people, or tool. My Time Sector system organises tasks by when you will do them. Here's n article I wrote about it that should explain things more.
www.carlpullein.com/blog/a-revolutionary-new-time-management-system-designed-for-the-21st-century/1/5/2020
If there is a need to track completed tasks you can automate that with a service like If This Then That (IFTTT). I use that to track completed tasks in a Google spreadsheet for a particular "project" in Todoist.
That's right @@sdreelin :) And if someone prefere Microsoft than Google, can use MS Flow.
@@Carl_Pullein hmm, David wrote that we should group a task around the same topic, so for example "Open New Bank Account" - that's probobly more that one task... What's you said, that it's not to need group this tasks? 😮 Don't get me wrong, but if it's not genious that would end with some chaos 😁
@@maikeru86 That's not what it says in my GTD book. You group tasks around the context. So, open bank account would mean going to the bank so you would have a context like "errands" and the task would be in there. You may have to make a call first or research what documents you need, athose tasks would go in either @phone or @computer (or @internet) depending on how you sent up your contexts.
Can Notion handle it all?
Not really, recurring task, having widget on my phone, quick add task, etc. - it is not Notion area. But for projects in Notion combined with ToDoist task reminders + links, it is great combo.
Probably. But would you want to trust one app to manage your whole life? That's a risk. What would you do if you lost all your data in Notion?
@@Carl_Pullein you can export all your content from Notion like from EN into html structure, that is what I am missing in ToDoist - personal offline data backup
Great video and content as always.
Glad you enjoyed it