 is the task management application of choice, and there are plenty of good reasons for this. In this short article, I want to show you my 5 absolute favorite Todoist productivity tips that will help you manage your tasks really efficiently.

A common problem people face when using productivity tools is that they spent far too much time setting up and maintaining their tools. Instead, it should be exactly the other way around: Productivity tools should help you get more time to focus on the actual work you have to do.

For Todoist, this means that adding lots of labels, priorities, times & thorough descriptions is just overkill for many users. Instead, I usually just add the plain task, and occasionally I'll add a priority or a due date. This makes task entries super quick, which means I can add a task whenever it comes to mind and then go back to focussing on my actual work.

Also, it can be a good practice to organize your tasks into Todoist projects. This helps you keep a clean structure, and it makes sure that you don't just dump all of your tasks in one giant list. If you have just one huge list, chances are that the perceived workload just becomes overwhelming.

Again, the key here is to be productive and not to just look like you are being productive.

In your job/business, there will often be tasks that need to be done regularly. These are often things like checking the quality of a product regularly, doing some sort of goal setting for your company, or any other tasks that has to be done repeatedly.

Instead of adding these tasks manually every time you have to do them, you can use recurring tasks in Todoist. This feature allows you to ask a task once, which will then re-appear in your Todoist account depending on the timeframe you set for it. For example, you could add a task called 

 . Todoist recognizes weekly as a scheduling command and will add the task to your dashboard/project every week.

Now you will never have to worry about forgetting this task, as Todoist will be there to remind you of it. This also means you'll have much less work adding tasks to your Todoist dashboard. My recommendation would be to make all tasks recurring for which it makes sense, as this will save you the most time.

Another great way to increase your productivity with Todoist is to use the built-in Todoist shortcuts. Some of the most important shortcuts you can use include:

It will take time and practice to be proficient with using the shortcuts. However, once you have a basic grasp of them, they will come in very handy.

During your interaction with Todoist, you may have already experienced the natural language processing in the application. Todoist has a well-trained natural language processing engine, which can detect key phrases and try and guess what action you want to be executed.

You can use it this feature to add tasks much faster, like we've already seen it with recurring tasks:

I highly recommend you get used to doing this when working with Todoist, as it will improve your productivity drastically.

Another great way to stay on top of your to-dos is to sync your calendar to your Todoist account. This turns your Todoist account into the single source of truth for everything you have to do. Meetings & events from your calendar will be added to your Todoist account automatically. Also, Todoist tasks with due dates will appear as events on your calendar.

This will minimize the need to keep on switching between multiple tools to synchronize your tasks. Setting up the sync is super easy. Just navigate to your Todoist settings, choose your calendar provider of choice and start the synchronization process. Keep in mind that the 2-way-synchronization is currently only available for Google Calendar.

That's it for this one! If you enjoyed this article, please share it with your friends & colleagues :)

Learn the absolute must-know things to use Todoist productively in your daily work-life!

5 essential Todoist productivity tips

Task management is essential to modern-day productivity. Luckily, if you are looking for an easy-to-use task management tool to manage your daily personal and work life, 

 is one of the most popular task management applications that is trusted by millions of users worldwide, because of its ease-of-use, powerful features and cross-platform availability. In this article, I want to introduce you to all its most important features. Let's get started right away!

Todoist is available on lots of different platforms, so you can use it wherever you want. There's browser version, desktop application, browser extension, mobile application, and smartwatches applications. There is also an email Add-on that converts any email to a task; available for Gmail and Outlook.

To use it, make sure to create an account over at

. There's a free plan available if you just want to try it out, while the premium version that comes with all the bells & whistles just costs $3/month.

When you're inside your Todoist dashboard, you can easily add a new task by clicking on the little + Icon in the top right corner. Alternatively, you can click on "Add task" button in the tasks list.

You'll then see a little task menu pop up, which allows you to enter the details of your task. Once you've entered them, your task will first land in your inbox. In order to keep things organized, Todoist allows you to sort your tasks into different projects & sections. Let's see how you can use them now.

As said before, projects are a way to organize your task in Todoist in multiple different containers. You can create projects for different areas of your work, you can create one project for every client you have, or however else you like to structure your work.

I personally like to have just a few projects for the big areas of my work.

To create a project, just click on the little "+" button next to the "Projects" area in the sidebar.

 symbol when creating a task. Now, a list of all the available projects will appear, and you can just choose the right one for this task.

If you have lots of tasks in a single project, it can make sense to introduce a more granular way of organizing your tasks. I like to use sections for projects that are involved with multiple different topics, or for projects that follow a specific process.

One example that I use it for would be my online course creation checklist.

See how there are multiple sections like "Prepare", "Plan" and "Record". These sections give me a clear process to follow when filming online courses.

You can add a section to your project by hovering below the last task you have added. A button will come up, which allows you to add sections & name them how you like.

Todoist has four priority levels, P1-P4, with P1 being the highest priority and P4 the lowest. To assign a priority level to a task, in the task description, type in the priority level, for example, 

Todoist will automatically recognize it as a very high-priority task. You can also change the priority by clicking on the flag symbol and selecting the priority level you want to assign the task.

To add dates to your tasks, simply open the task, and in the task description, simply add the date using natural language. For example, you can add 

 and Todoist will automatically pick this date and schedule the task. You can also use the Scheduler, in the task, to manually pick a date from the calendar. 

Once you set the due date for a task, you will automatically get a reminder about the task. By default, the reminder is ten minutes before you complete the task, but you can update this in the settings. To also manually set a reminder, click on the clock in the task description window and add a reminder.

When you have a Todoist project with multiple sections, you get the option to switch between the "Board view" and the "List view". List view is just the default to-do list that we've worked with all along. And if you've ever used a Kanban board, the Board view will also feel really natural to you. To switch between the views, go to the "View" settings and choose the view you want to use.

Here are the two views again, so you can see how they look side-by-side:

Labels allow you to organize the tasks in your Todoist account by giving it certain attributes. For example, you could create a label for tasks that take less than 15 minutes to complete. Whenever you've got a bit of spare time, you could then go into your Todoist account to work on one of these tasks. There's no limit to how many labels, you can create, but my recommendation would be to keep the number low, as it increases the complexity of your Todoist setup.

To create a Todoist label, navigate to the "Filters & Labels" menu in the top left.

You can now add a label by clicking on the little "+" icon. Now just need to add a label name and give your label a color.

To use Todoist labels in your tasks, simply use the “@” symbol in the task description box and a list of available labels will appear. Now you just need to select the labels that you want to apply.

Todoist filters allow you to filter to specific subsets of your tasks, by creating a view where only tasks matching certain criteria will show up. This is extremely useful if you're the kind of person that has hundreds of tasks in their Todoist account. In these cases, it can be hard to find the task that are the most important for you to work on.

Creating a filter in Todoist is similar to creating a label. First, navigate to the "Filters & Labels" tab in the left sidebar.

Now, you can again click on the little "+" button to create the filter. This time, you'll have to provide a name, a color as well as the filter query. Now there are a lot of filter queries, available, so I won't cover all the options available (if you want to see what's possible with filter queries, check out the 

Here are some basic queries to get started:

When you're happy with the query that you have created, you can hit save. Now, this filter will only show you the tasks that match all of these criteria!

To make the best out of Todoist, it is highly recommended that you integrate your calendar with Todoist. This will allow for real-time, two-way synchronization between your calendar and Todoist tasks. To do this, click on your avatar in the top right corner and select integrations.

Here, select the calendar of your choice and then go through the setup process. I recommend using Google Calendar as it's the only provider that allows you to have a 2-way-synchronization with Todoist.

Once the integration with Google Calendar is done, tasks created in Todoist and assigned dates will automatically appear in your Google Calendar. Also, tasks created in your Google calendar will be synced to your Todoist account in real-time. That means that you will be able to manage your entire workday directly from Todoist, without having to fear that you've missed an important meeting.

And that's it! You're now set to establish Todoist as the productivity assistant that reminds you of everything that you have to do!

Learn the basics of the popular to-do list application Todoist and learn what it's capable of in this article. Get a great overview of Todoist best features here.

Todoist basics

Emails are an important everyday communication tool we encounter more often than not in this digital age. We spend a considerable amount of time writing, reading, sending, and replying to emails. 

One of the most widely used email services is 

 by Google. In this article, I will show you how to save time, organize, and sort your emails to increase productivity by the use of Gmail Filters.

Filters can be considered as doors, where the condition set; 

 act as a key to the door. Once an email meets certain criteria, it opens the door that leads to the execution of the set instructions or automation as defined in the filter criteria.

The fascinating thing about filters used in Gmail is that they come in handy and are very easy to set up as you will see. 

One of the easiest and most commonly used filter options is the use of the Gmail search bar. The process of searching for an email in your mailbox by use of the Gmail Search bar is the most basic filter we use.

Example: Filter for mails from Marie Poulin

Let’s take the example that you want to check for 

 newsletter emails, by simply inputting the names on the search bar, you will see all the emails sent or received from her.

This makes it easier to locate the specific email you want. Even if it was sent a year ago, you can search and get it. Isn’t that amazing? Maybe you want to get some tips that were shared a while ago. In a brink of a second, you will have everything that you need.

In this, we are applying automation to the emails if they met the specific criteria.  We have automatically filtered for all mails from Marie Poulin

The filter selection allows you to filter a specific email address, subject lines, certain words, emails of a certain size, specific timeframe, and attachments. Just try out all the options to filter for exactly the emails that you want.

The Gmail search bar comes with advanced search options which give you more criteria that you can use to search and filter through your email. 

 from the Gmail search bar, click on the button at the right-hand end of the search bar. A drop-down menu will appear with additional criteria you can use to enhance your search. Let us go through what each of the options on the dropdown menu means:

 This option is used to filter out an email sent from a specific email address.

 It is used to filter out an email you sent out to a specific email address 

 It is used to filter out an email that has the specific subject indicated.

: It is used to filter out an email with the specific keywords indicated

: The option is used to filter out emails that don't contain specific words

 It is used to filter out emails that are within the size criteria specified

: It is used to filter out emails within the specific timeframe

 It is used to specify the folders in the Mailbox you want to search/filter through.

The dropdown search menu also offers the option to filter out emails with attachments, or with chats - if needed, by clicking on the checkbox.

As simple as that, you can use the various options to make your mailbox functions easier. Your use of Gmail will become much easier than you have ever imagined!

Now that you've filtered for the right mails, it's time to tell Gmail what to do when receiving a new mail matching our conditions. To do that, click on the 

A dropdown option will appear with several filter criteria; let us go through each of them to understand their use and application.

 Enabling this option will make any mail matching the conditions skip the inbox. Really useful for mails that are annoying & not important to you. Also great, if you want to categorize your mail before reading it.

  This option will mark the email as read. Great for mails that aren't important, as it reduces the stress of having thousands of unopened emails.

: This option will star the message and the email will appear in the Starred Message Folder. Great for important emails that you want to keep as "Starred".

 This option is very useful when it comes to organizing and categorizing your emails. This menu option allows you to create labels of your choice and once an email meets the criteria set for the label, the email will be sent to the specific folder. 

you can have a newsletter label for all the newsletter emails you receive.

: this option will automatically forward the email to the forwarding email addresses defined within this option.

 – This option will automatically delete the email set in the criteria once received. While using this option, be careful not to apply to important email. (Personally, I think it's not great to use this option. Archive mails that you think are not important instead of deleting them directly)

 – There are times when emails that are not spam are occasionally sent to the spam folder. You can use this option for emails you are sure are not spam.

: This option allows you to automatically reply to the email using a pre-set email template/message.

 This option allows you to automatically mark, or never mark, the emails as important.

 This option allows you to categorize an email in the pre-set categories e.g. primary, social, etc.

Also, apply filter to other matching conversations

: This option allows you to apply the filter rules set out to other emails that match the criteria. 

After selecting the filter options that suit your needs, click create filter, and congratulations, you have set up your first Gmail filter! Your emails will now appear as per the filter criteria you set out.

There's also another way to set up filters that's great if you want to create a filter as you read an email.

 Click on the more option, (three dots on the far right of the email) 

 Once done with that, click on the “Filter messages like this” option.

Upon doing this, Gmail will filter through your mailbox and bring up emails similar to the one selected. The same drop-down menu similar to that of the Advanced Search bar option will appear. You can now refine your filters to find what you are looking for and apply as shown above.

Filters can come in handy in organizing, automating, and enhancing overall productivity by saving time while using your Gmail.

#1: Organizing Emails and Pre-applying Labels.

You can use the filter options to automatically move emails to specific categories, folders, and labels based on your preference. This means you know exactly where to look for specific emails, saving time while remaining organized.

You can also organize emails based on tags, which can allow you to have a separate space in your Gmail account. Hence, no more distraction while doing your normal work. Now, you can just check for specific emails during your preferred time. Even if you want once a week, it's all up to you!

Not only can you do that for emails, but also specific documents like invoices or receipts. You can keep track of all your transactions in one place. Again, an absolute time saver!

#2: Filtering Out Spam or Unnecessary Emails.

Filters also come in handy in sorting out spam, as well as emails that you feel are not important and most probably will not read anyway. By applying filters, you can automatically send such emails straight to the “Not Important” folder. 

You can now say goodbye to the automated messages from your social media that you feel should not appear in your inbox.

One very useful advanced use case for filters is to send out automated replies using the pre-set email templates for incoming mail that meets the set criteria. 

You can think of the many scenarios where this option can come in handy, and apply it accordingly. For example, sending automated emails while on vacation.

However, ensure your filter criteria are set up correctly, to avoid sending out the wrong templates to the wrong recipient.

Get to inbox zero by setting up Gmail filters. Learn how to automatically label & categorize your email in 5 minutes.

Gmail filters: Organize your inbox easily

As knowledge workers, we have to constantly share links with our friends, colleagues & clients. On a small scale, this works perfectly fine, but if you're running a company with hundreds of different resources spread out across all of social media, your own website, your newsletter & your offline marketing resources, it can get really messy quickly.

 come in. Rebrandly allows you to shorten, brand, manage and track your links across all different platforms. It gives you a single dashboard to create and manage those links easily.

In this guide, I will show you how you can easily set it up for your business, so that you will never struggle with managing links again.

A link shortener is a tool that allows you to shorten links by providing a shorter & more memorable link, which is then redirected to the initial page. Take a look at the example below. The first link looks really cryptic, and a bit odd. The second link looks much more natural, and you can already guess what you will find when entering this URL into your search bar: A tutorial on how to use Rebrandly.

This is essentially what a link shortener allows you to do, and I will show you how you can do it using Rebrandly.

A link management tool does more than just shortening your links. It's where you can edit & redirect your links, make your links branded, see link analytics & more. Rebrandly combines a link shortener with a link management tool, meaning it's well suited for covering your link needs 😊

To use Rebrandly, you will first need to create an account. I recommend that you use the free account to get started, as it's more than enough for freelancers or smaller businesses. If you're part of a larger organization, it might be a better idea to go with one of their premium plans, as they allow you to manage your links with other team members.

Just click on the signup button, to create an account with your email address or using a different authentication method like 

After signing up, you can now start using Rebrandly. One crucial thing is to connect your domains to Rebrandly. 

This will allow you to create custom shortened links that are branded with your domain name. This makes your links look more professional, creates trust with your audience, and brings uniformity to your brand. In this article, we are going to use the learnwithjanosch.com  domain (That's just my test domain for projects like this).

 To connect your domain, click on the “Domains” button at the top bar, and it will redirect you to a new page. 

 Once there, click on the “New Domain” button. It will redirect you to a new page, and you have the option to either register a new custom domain or connect a domain.

If you do not have a domain and would like to register one, then choose the first option. If you already own a domain, then go ahead with the “Connect a Domain” option.  We will focus on the "Connect a Domain“ Option. 

 Once you click on the “Connect a domain” option, a pop-up will appear asking you to input your domain name. Input your domain and click next. 

 You will then be required to specify if the domain is spare or not. 

 The next step will be choosing the subdomain that you want to be used by Rebrandly to customize your links. In our case, we will use “

 After choosing your subdomain name, click on next.

To finish setting up your domain and subdomain with Rebrandly, you'll need to add an “A” Record to the DNS settings of your domain. To do this, log in to your hosting/domain provider account and go to the DNS Settings. The settings will be in different locations depending on the hosting/domain service provider.

Here's what it looks like with my current hosting provider, Netlify:

Once you get to the DNS settings for your domain, click on create a new "A" record. Under the hostname or name, input the subdomain you selected. In our case, we went with “go”. In the Rebrandly domain set up page, copy the "Points to" (or address) indicated and paste it in the “IPv4 Address” input in your DNS settings page. For the TTL, you can leave it at its default. 

Once you click on create, your subdomain is now connected to Rebrandly. Give it some time to synchronize and for the DNS configurations to be verified. This process might take up to 24 hours to finalize. 

If you are not sure about how to create an “A” record in your domain/hosting service, kindly look at the help articles by your provider or contact their support. If you're still stuck, I've got a 

 that focuses on helping you resolve technical hurdles with your tech tools 😊

Once the DNS settings are verified, go back to your Rebrandly Domains page. You will notice that the subdomain has a green icon, meaning that it is now active. Now it's time to create our first branded link. It is an easy process! 

In our case, we are going to use the link from one of my YouTube videos to illustrate how to create a branded link. You can use any link of your preference.

 Copy the link you want to customize, then head back to Rebrandly and go to the "Links" page in the menu.

 On this page, click on the “New Link” button, and a popup will appear. Here you can paste in your copied link.

Choose which branded domain you want to use with the link. If you only added one domain to Rebrandly, choose that one. Next, use the slash tag input field to type what you want to appear after your branded domain for your branded link. It is advisable to use a slash tag that describes what the link directs to.

 After inputting the slash tag, click on create link and Rebrandly will generate your new custom branded link.

Check if the link works. You can do this by clicking on the “Visit URL link” on Rebrandly or copying and pasting the newly created URL into your browser. If it works, then you're good to go!

Sometimes, you might want to the destination of a link after you've initially created it. For example, let's say you're linking to one of your products and for a certain time, you want to link people to a special discount page. You can easily do that using Rebrandly!

All you need to do is to point the Rebrandly link to the discount page temporarily for the promotional period. Once the promotion is over, you change it back to the normal product page easily through Rebrandly.

To edit the link, just click on the little "Edit" button in your link overview:

Then, the link menu will pop up, and you will be able to change the link by clicking on the button next to the link.

Another great feature by Rebrandly is that it generates custom QR codes for each link you rebrand. This means you have access to QR codes which you can print and use in your marketing and promotional materials. 

To access this QR code, go to an individual link that you've created with Rebrandly and then click on the little QR code symbol in the menu options.

Now you will see a popup window that gives you different sizes & formats of your QR code for you to download.

Finally, there is the link analytics feature. This allows you to see how your links are performing and how your audience is interacting with them.  You can access these statistics by clicking on a single link and then scrolling down.

This information can help you determine what your most important traffic channels are and can give you insight into how well people that are clicking on your links are converting to customers, email subscribers, etc. And the best part is that this is all available in the free version of 

Learn how to shorten, brand & manage your links with Rebrandly.

Organization tutorials

5 essential Todoist productivity tips

Todoist basics

Gmail filters: Organize your inbox easily

Rebrandly tutorial: Shorten, brand & manage your links