How to Use Todoist for High School

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I helped my kids organize their high school work using Todoist.

I'm a bit of an organizational system junkie, but obviously not everyone is.  I've been trying to find a system that works well for organizing tasks for each of my kids and they both have really different styles.  I started out using Trello with both of my kids -- you can see my video on that.  My son almost immediately found it too complicated and confusing to use.  Fair enough.  He really just wanted to use one of those super oversimplified homework apps, but after trying a couple out, I thought they were way too limited.  So, he's now using Todoist to manage school work, chores, and his college application process.

Because we were looking for a simple system, this use of Todoist is fairly straightforward.  Simple is important though -- the more complicated you make things, the less inclined you are to maintain your system, and the more likely you are to stop using it altogether.  My hope is that this system will be simple and effective enough for my son to take to college as a way for him to organize his life beyond high school.  Fingers crossed.  

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. 

So, let me cover the five kinds of tasks that go into Todoist for my son and how he handles them:

• School work - I have a whole rant about how difficult high school organization is which I went into on my Trello video, but I will spare you here.  Suffice it to say, high schoolers have a lot coming at them with assignments coming in willy nilly from teachers with very little advance notice.  If your school is set up more like a college in that teachers are required to plan out their courses months in advance, you may want to view my video on using Todoist for College.  I'm going to assume for the purposes of this video that you may know about SOME long-term projects or papers for a class, but that most of your assignments will be coming at you on a weekly or daily basis.   The first thing you want to do in Todoist is set up a big overall project called School.  Then under this project, you want to make sub-projects for each class you are taking that will give assignments.  No need to create a project for your personal fitness class if they never give homework.  You can create new projects by hitting the three dots to the right and choosing to add a project below. Give each class it's own color and spice it up with an emoji if you want from your phone keyboard.  Then make sure that it is a sub-project under School by indenting it with this movement handle to the left.  Once you have all of your classes set up as sub-projects, you can start tagging assignments as you enter them.  So, during the day, you go from class to class entering in all of the things that you need to do: homework for trig, a worksheet for Geosystems, study vocab for English, and reading and a vocab sheet for AP Gov.  Okay, you can capture these on the fly without assigning them to a project and they will just end up in your inbox.  Then later you can assign them to projects and give them due dates.  A quick note about due dates.  You may be tempted to put in the actual due date for you assignment.  This worksheet is due on 11/7.  Unfortunately, if you do that, it won’t show up in your Today list until the ACTUAL DAY IT IS DUE.  That doesn’t give you much time to work on it, does it?  Instead, i always put in the date of when i need to work on something.  So, if the worksheet is due on the 7th, i would put this assignment on the 6th or earlier.  Now you can go to the Today view to see all the things you need to work on today.  Then you can drag and drop them into the order that you want to work on them, checking them off as you complete them.  In addition, you can choose to view all of your assignments for a specific class and what may be coming up by looking at the project view.  Okay -- in addition to daily assignments you may also have some
• School projects - So let's say you know you have an Geosystems research project due on November 15th.  You can put this in your Geosystems sub-project along with the due date.  Again, putting in the due date means that this task isn't going to come up on your Today list until the day it is due.  Obviously there are LOTS of tasks you'll need to do before turning this project in.  So, I would immediately enter a sub-task to this parent task to "Plan out the tasks for this project" and assign a date to it -- say 10/20.  Okay -- on October 20, this will show up in my Today list.  On that day, I would plan out all of the other steps that I need to accomplish in order to get this project done and assign work dates to each of them.  That way I can be working ahead on the tasks for this project so that it doesn’t sneak up on me.  High schoolers also have
• Other projects - that aren't related to the classes they are taking.  I'm specifically thinking of the enormous project of applying to colleges.  We have easily been working on this project for about a year for my son who plans to play tennis in college.  But as parents and high school kids know, there are like a thousand little tasks that you need to do to get all of your college applications in.  I would put this in as a project and share it with my parents.  My son, my husband, and I all share this project together.  With shared projects, they show up on everyone's Todoist and you can assign certain people to tasks.  For example, I needed to fill out the parent survey for the guidance department, but my son needed to ask his teacher to write him a recommendation.  If I'm the assigned owner of the task, it only shows up on MY Today list of tasks, but if no one is assigned, it shows up on everyone's Today list.  My daughter is trying to start a club at her school, which would be another good example of this kind of project.
• Other tasks - everyone has stuff they need to remember to do that is outside of school work -- make a dermotologist appointment, check with mom about paying for a yearbook, pay John back from the weekend, whatever.  I have a generic project called "Reminders" that I stick all of this stuff in.  I like to get it out of my brain and into Todoist or else it just takes up space in there!  And finally,
• Recurring chores - there are certain things that you have to do everyday or every week -- organize Todoist, walk the dog, unload the dishwasher, etc.  Todoist allows you to make tasks recurring, so you can put them in as happening every weekday, every Monday, or every month.  My son is using some daily recurring chores to build good habits and to be a little more organized.  

What I like about Todoist is that it is a full-featured task management system rather than a limited system that just deals with homework.  As your life gets more complicated, you can take Todoist with you to manage not just school work, but other parts of your life.  However, if you just want a simple system, where you enter tasks and check them off, it can easily function at that level.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!