I’ve used Todoist for almost a decade and completed over 50,000 tasks on there. Over time my setup has changed quite a lot.
Previously I used a standard GTD setup - one that Todoist itself lends itself to.
If you haven’t read Getting things Done, one thing it defines that anything that requires 2 or more actions as a “Project”. So if you need to plan a holiday, you may have a holiday project and then task related - book flights, define budget etc.
Over time I found this project setup became a burden, tasks were everywhere and I was always juggling what was and wasn’t a “project”. It also took a long time to review my tasks and priorities them because they spanned so many different areas of life.
Instead I now have a simple low maintenance system
- 4 Projects
- Now - what I must do asap
- Next - things I need to do but aren’t as urgent as now
- Later - tasks with no deadline
- Routines - recurring tasks divided into section of daily, monthly, yearly. These account for a lot of my day to day tasks as I prefer having routine systems.
- Labels corresponding to areas of my life. For example:
- @_work is day job tasks
- @_house is anything house related
- @_project/repowarden is anything related to repowarden one of my side projects. These types of projects get a prefix because I can then filter and get all side project related tasks
- No more than 3 tasks scheduled per day - from most important to least. I reviewed my Todoist habits last year and found that less than 0.7% of my tasks were marked as important. The things I were doing was important but it makes me consider whether I was prioritising visually for myself to make it easier to know what to do next.
And that’s it.
Crucially, to keep things light I make the following UI tweaks
- Make all Labels Grey - I’m deliberately not using them to colour code tasks
- Remove Task count - more tasks makes me feel overwhelmed
Finally, it wouldn’t be a system in 2026 without using AI so I find it helpfully to use AI in the following ways
- Identify tasks that haven’t been priorities - this is based on giving it context around my overarching yearly theme and priorities
- Identify tasks that need to be split (normally they contain the word “and”)
- Identify tasks that need more information to complete “speak to Jack” is meaningless, “speak to Jack about the quarterly sales report to identify opportunities” provides the context and offloads the memory.
- Find tasks that can be delegated or removed.
Hopefully you find this system useful. As with anything, it could do with further refinement and naturally adapts as my requirements change.