Simple & powerful task management for individuals & small teams

Todoist

 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

Client onboarding can be a time-consuming process that many client-based businesses have to deal with on a regular basis. If done right, it can be a good start to a long & healthy relationship with your new client, but when not done properly, it can make your team unproductive and can ruin your first impression with your customer.

In this guide, I'm going to show you how you can set up a great onboarding process that is simple to follow, highly customizable & completely automated. We'll be using some of the most commonly used tools for managing modern digital companies like 

 & many more. Let's get started right away!

In order to build any good process automation, you first need to think about what you actually want to achieve with your automation. In the case of an onboarding process, we mainly want to complete lots of organizational tasks, like:

Make sure that you know what you want to include in your onboarding process, before moving forward with this guide.

Now let's get started with setting up the onboarding process. The first thing we have to do is to create an onboarding form. This form will be the trigger for our onboarding process. It's where our client will be entering their information and where we can ask questions based on our individual onboarding process. Later, we'll use that information in our automation workflows, so be sure not to skip this step.

 which is an easy-to-use and powerful form building platform. It's great for our onboarding automation, because it allows you to ask your client all types of questions easily and it's very well integrated with automation tools like Zapier.

Now inside of Typeform, we'll create a new form for our onboarding process. Here you can add all the questions you'd like to ask your new clients. 

 a really simple version of what this could look like. Obviously, you can add everything that makes sense to you here. Just keep in mind that this will be one of the first touchpoints that your client has with your company, so try to make it easy & somewhat quick to fill out.

Once you've finished setting up the form, go through a test run so that you actually have a real example of the data that your client will enter in the form. This will help us with the Zapier automation.

Now that you've got a example form entry ready, we can get started with the actual automation. To do that, head over to 

Again, if you're not yet familiar with Zapier feel free to watch my 

. If you want to learn more about all the possibilities that Zapier gives you, take a look at my 

Ok, so let's set up the trigger for our automation now:

 Create a new zap, then search for Typeform and choose the Typeform app as your trigger. 

 For the trigger event, choose the "New Entry" trigger event.

 Next, choose the Typeform account that you want to connect with this automation. If you've never connected your Typeform to Zapier, you will first have to authenticate the account.

 Choose the form that you created inside of Typeform. This let's Zapier know which form to trigger the automation for.

 Now it's time to test if the automation triggers correctly. To do that, just click on the "Test trigger" button.

⁠If Zapier is able to get data from the trigger successfully, it means we're now ready to automate tasks in your onboarding process!

The first thing we'll automate is creating a project in our team task management application. In my case that's 

. First, we'll create a project in Todoist and then in the next step we'll add in employees and external collaborators.

 Go back to your Zapier automation and add a new step to the automation. Choose Todoist as the app.

Next, choose "Create Project" as the event.

 Again connect you're Todoist account if you haven't connected it yet.

 Now we'll have to set up the first actual automation step. We have to define set up the name of the project we want to create. Obviously, this should not be the same everytime. Instead, we want this to be set based on information our client entered into our onboarding form.

To achieve this, click on the "Name" field and look for the field "Company name" in the dropdown list. This will of course only work if you've set up a field for the company name in your Typeform automation before.

: Just as before, you'll have to test your action to see if it works. This time, we can actually check if it worked by going to our Todoist account and checking if the project has been successfully created. In my case, it worked!

Right now, you're the only person that has access to the newly created project, but if you're working with a team, you'll likely want to add your team members to the project as well. Let's set this up inside of Zapier as well.

 Create an additional action step and choose Todoist again.

 Then choose the action, “Invite a user to project in Todoist”.

In order for Zapier to know which project the users should be added to, you need to specify it in the "Project" field. To do that, go to the "Custom" tab and then choose the ID that was generated in the previous step.

Enter the email addresess of the people you want to invite into the field. This adds the user to the project in Todoist. Just make sure, that you're using the same email addresses that your team members are registered with in Todoist.

 as well. Clockify is an easy-to-use time-tracking solution that you can use to log hours for your clients in a simple way. In this step, we'll create set up the client so that your team can just logging hours immediately.

 Add a new automation step and choose Clockify as the app.

 As the event, choose the "Create client" option.

Create the client in Clockify. For the "Workspace" you can just use your default workspace. For the client name, we'll again get the data from the Typeform response. You'll need to add a field for the client name in your onboarding form for this to work if you haven't done that already.

 That’s it! Now you can check the Clockify app to see if the client has been added.

Now, repeat this step following the same steps to create a project for that client as well. To tell Zapier which client you want to add the project for, use the project ID like we did it for the Todoist step.

As we also want to communicate with our client, let's create a joint 

: Add a new automation step and choose Slack as the app. (You see how this process is pretty similar).

 As the event, choose the "Create a channel" option.

 Choose your Slack account and enter the channel name. You can use the 

In order to add users to your Slack channel, we'll have to create an additional automation step.

 Add a new automation step and choose Slack as the app.

 Choose your Slack account, the previous ID, and the Slack channel that you used. Then add the users (you can add multiple).

Next, we'll create a folder structure in Google Drive. This will save you time instead of manually doing it.

 Add a new automation step and choose Google Drive as the app and choose "Create folder" as the action. 

 Choose your account and set up the action. The folder name should be the “business name”. For the Drive, you can choose your Google Drive.

 Lastly, use the name of your project as the name of the Drive folder.

To add more subfolders, just repeat this procedure and use the ID of the parent folder in the parent folder field.

We can't automate everything perfectly, so we'll have to do some manual work to complement our automation. Also, we want to have an internal strategy call for every new client to get all employees on board. To rememember this for every client, we'll set up a reminder in Zapier

To do that, add a new automation step using the Todoist app, choose your account, and choose "Create Task" as the action. As the name of this tasks, write down the manual tasks that need to be done in order to complete the onboarding process. This could be scheduling the internal call, requesting login credentials from the client or anything else.

After you're done, assign this task to one of your team members, so there's a clear responsibility for this task. Also don't forget to test!

That's it! We've finished the onboarding process. Again, this guide only shows one of millions of ways to set up a process like this. You can get way more advanced than this, with more complex forms that clients fill out, where they upload documents, watch an onboarding video series, or get added to your client email list. Also, it doesn't matter which tools you use and which things you include. In the end, it just has to make sense for you and your business.

Hope you enjoyed this guide. See you next time :)

Learn how to create a complete client onboarding process for your business with Zapier