The secret to using a task management system is to make it an everyday habit. My task manager of choice is Todoist and I put virtually everything I want to get done into it: work stuff, side projects, home repair tasks, kids' school stuff, whatever. It all goes into Todoist, and I'm dipping in and out of that app to check off tasks and add new ones, every day, many, many times a day.
Get started with Todoist; Download Todoist; Create a Todoist account; Log in or out of Todoist; Change your Home view; Task Quick Add; How to use search; Getting Things Done (GTD) with Todoist; Pomodoro with Todoist; Introduction to: Sub-tasks; Due dates and times; Introduction to: Sections; Visualize your workflow with Board view; Introduction. One of the cool things about defining date filters in Todoist is that Todoist supports natural language processing. This means you can type 'Tomorrow' and Todoist will understand that and will filter for tasks with a due date of tomorrow.
Creating new tasks quickly and easily is key, of course. I use virtually all of the many methods that Todoist offers for adding tasks, from Quick Add on my desktop (essential) to voice dictating tasks into Google Assistant (less essential). I've also created an iOS shortcut called 'Todoist Task from Webpage' that has become an essential part of my productivity. I'm making it publicly available today and you can download it here for free and install it on your iPhone or iPad.
I made this shortcut because so many of the tasks I create in Todoist each day are based on what I come across in my web browser. On any given web page, I might find that I want to follow up on it at a later time, download something linked on the page, make a purchase, watch a video, or something similar. In fact, it used to be that a lot of the tabs I'd keep open in my browser were actually tasks in disguise: I'd want to keep them available so that I could take some action on them later. Obviously it's more useful to turn these into tasks than to let them linger as tabs for days or weeks.
The key to translating a page you're looking at into a task that you'll actually take action on is quickly capturing the page's URL. You can do this manually in Todoist by either adding the link as a comment on a task or, even better, embedding the link into the text of the task itself in Markdown form. This is straightforward, but of course the more quickly and easily you can create a task the better.
Todoist Support
When you run this shortcut on iPhone or iPad by selecting it from the share menu in mobile Safari (sorry, Chrome on iOS doesn't support the Shortcuts actions that make this possible) it grabs the URL and the title of the page and quickly formats them as a Markdown link. You can then choose from a list of actions with which to prepend that link, e.g., 'Read,' 'Follow up on,' 'Purchase,' etc. to form the text of the new task. Another menu allows you to assign the task to one of your pre-existing Todoist projects, and the due date is automatically set as today. That's it; with a few clicks, the page has been turned into a Todoist task.
Here's what it looks like on an iPad:
Some other nifty details of this shortcut:
- Tasks are assigned a due date of today unless you're running the shortcut after 9:00p local time, in which case it automatically assigns the next day as the due date.
- Turning a link on YouTube.com into a task is a little trickier, so the shortcut actually makes a quick call to the YouTube API to get the information necessary to create a new task. As a result, you can also use this shortcut from the the YouTube app. Tap on the share icon and then swipe over to the More action to find the shortcut.
- In some cases where the preset actions don't quite make sense to prepend to the page title, there's a custom option to allow you to fully edit the text of the task on the fly.
I use this shortcut every day, multiple times a day, and it's become an essential part of how I think about task management. I now stash all kinds of pages into tasks, from Adobe XD web prototypes that I want to review later, to YouTube videos that I come across during the workday, to Kickstarter campaigns I want to consider funding, and much more. If you're using Todoist (and if you're not, you should be) give this a try and let me know what you think.
This shortcut requires iOS or iPadOS 14.4 and the latest version of the Todoist app for iPhone or iPad. Note that if you've never run third-party shortcuts before, you'll need to follow these steps. Also check out ExactPic my suite of image editing shortcuts
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