How to Use Todoist for College
I've been using two task management platforms in parallel to manage my work for grad school this semester. I just did some videos recently on how to use Trello to manage school work in college/university and also high school. This video is about Todoist. Apologies in advance if you've already seen the other videos -- there will be a little duplication.
Although I really like the versatility and richness of features from Trello, in the end, I've decided to use Todoist based on my requirements and needs. I've actually started using it for all my task management, but in this video, I'll just talk about managing college work.
I'm in a part-time, partial distance learning program and am taking three classes this semester. Because of this, my set up will be a little simpler than it would be for those of you who are taking a full load, but the basic ideas all still apply.
I haven't done a full tutorial video on Todoist yet, but in it's most basic form, you add tasks to Todoist with or without due dates, recurrences, and priority levels. If you upgrade to the premium version, you can also add labels and notes. What I want to focus on here is Todoist's ability to work with Projects. Projects are crucial to Todoist. In fact, if you do not assign a task to a project, it will remain in your inbox until you assign one to it.
I have a project named Grad School. Within it, I have some generic recurring tasks like registering for classes and returning rental textbooks. I also have a weekly recurring task to plan out my tasks for the week -- we'll talk about that more later. None of these tasks are specific to a class.
Okay -- so this semester I'm taking three classes. I add each of them in as sub-projects underneath the parent Grad School project. Todoist allows you to do 4 levels of projects, but we won't need all of those. In order to add a sub-project, I click on the three dots to the right of Grad School, choose to Add Project below, and assign it a color. So, now I need to use this movement icon to the left of the project to indent it underneath Grad School. You can tell each of these is a sub-project to Grad school since I can collapse them using this arrow.
In my experience, college professors need to be pretty organized. The professors in my program have generally planned the entire semester out week by week with the reading, assignments, big projects, etc. for each week in the syllabus. At the beginning of the semester, I take each of the syllabi and enter all of that information into Todoist. It take a couple of hours, but saves me having to do the data entry and administrative stuff throughout the semester.
Here's how I do it. Let's take my Disorders class as an example. For each week, I put in a task that shows the week's topic. The week of October 23 has a topic of Depressive Disorders. This task has a due date that marks the start of the week -- 10/21. This is a little off since I like to start my weeks on Mondays and this professor has a Wed to Wed weekly cycle. Okay -- so now I enter in all of my reading and assignments for that week as sub-tasks under this. So, you can see that I have to read three different chapters, which I put in as three separate tasks, do a critical thinking discussion post, and take a quiz. These are sub-tasks under the weekly topic, so I can collapse them underneath the weekly parent task. You can also see that I haven't put any due dates on any of the subtasks, only on the main one. I'll show you how this works in a minute.
Okay -- so I go through and enter a parent task and sub-tasks in for every week of the semester, for every class. Todoist makes it easy to put in multiple tasks -- if you paste in tasks on multiple lines, it will ask if you want to create 1 task or multiple. You can see I did this for my Research class as well. My Spirituality class is organized not by weeks, but by modules which run for 2 weeks, so I put in the parent tasks and sub-tasks by module. Again, only the weekly parent task gets a due date assigned for now.
Each class generally has a big project or paper (or several) as well as weekly assignments. Okay -- I put those in as well. For example, in my Disorders class, I have a final paper due on December 4. So, I put in the main project task with the due date. Then I will enter at least one sub-task -- to remind myself to plan out the tasks for this paper. For this sub-tasks, I will set a due date. That task happened already on 10/8, so I happen to have all of the other subtasks for this paper planned out with due dates attached. Usually these big projects tend to get lost in the shuffle, so I usually mark them with an icon when I’m using the iOS version of Todoist. You can see most of my projects have a spade symbol on them so that they stand out from the weekly assignments.
Here's how this works on a weekly basis. I have a general task on Mondays to organize and plan out my grad school tasks for the week. In addition, for each of my classes, the weekly parent task will pop up on Mondays. So, this is a bit of a simplified view, since I would normally have a bunch of other non-grad school tasks in my Today list, but here's what I have on a given Monday. Now, to plan out my tasks for the week, I go to each of these weekly overview tasks and expand them so that I can see all of the subtasks. Now I take a look at my calendar for the week and plan out when I want to accomplish each thing. And I put dates into each of the subtasks. Once I have dates set for all of the subtasks, I DO NOT check the parent task off as complete. Doing that would mark all of the subtasks as complete as well, and I haven't even gotten started on them. Instead, I simply set the parent task to "no due date." That eliminates the parent task from my list for Today, but any subtasks that are assigned to today still remain. In addition, if I go into Projects, I can see it. You’ll notice that each of the weekly parent tasks has an star emoji marking it. That is so it pops out in the Projects View. Todoist has a lot of white space, which I find can make things all look too uniform, but this is the way I make the current week more obvious.
I go through and do this for each of my classes with their weekly parent task. So, on any given day of the week, I may have 7-8 different readings or assignments from a variety of classes that I need to do. I can drag and drop them into the order I plan to do them and then get to work, checking them off as I go. Once I've completed each of the subtasks under a weekly parent task -- I can mark it as complete and it disappears from the project. Pretty regularly, I check each of my classes under projects to make sure nothing is falling through the cracks.
One other note. If you are using Todoist for more than just your school work, you may have 15 other tasks in your Today list along with your school work. I find it a little tedious to drag each school task up to the top to the list once I wanted to start working through them, so I discovered an easier way. If I just highlight and select all of my school tasks, I can then assign them a higher priority, like say blue and that automatically sorts those tasks up to the top of the today list. I can then drag and drop to change the order among other tasks of the same priority, but not with tasks that have a different priority. Since I tend to like to work on school work in a time block, this is perfect.
This system works well for me. I can keep track of my school work and regular tasks in the same system, I can plan in advance without having to determine due dates for each subtask months in advance, and I can sort my regular tasks and school work into an order that makes sense for my daily work flow. Turning on Completed Tasks in the project also allows me to go back and see work that I've already finished. Let me know what you think. Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!
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