Hello everyone. Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress.
Todoist is arguably the most popular to-do list app in the world right now, and actually, I would say it's probably the very best pure task manager that is available. So then why on earth don't I use it? That's a common question that I receive, and so today I wanted to give you a few reasons why.
Now up front I wanna tell you this video's not intended to try and convince you to not use Todoist, especially if you currently are a Todoist user or you're thinking of using Todoist. I simply want to explain why I choose not to use Todoist as my primary task manager.
So, first and foremost, whenever I am thinking of adding a new system or app or workflow, I'm very cautious of how many additional tools I am bringing or including in my productivity system. If you're a longtime subscriber here to the Simpletivity channel, you will know that my primary way of managing my tasks is within my calendar. I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail in this video. You can see some of my other videos, and I'll leave links to those in the description below, but I think it's key, I think it's crucial, that you see your tasks on the same screen as your meetings and events and other things that you have going on in your calendar.
Now, it's not to say that Todoist doesn't have an integration with online calendars. In fact, right here you can see these little orange tasks at the top are actually synced with this particular Todoist account. So I can see all of these tasks within my calendar. I can move them around as well if I want to, and the sync is actually pretty good in terms of changing those tasks, and sometimes it can take a few seconds or maybe even a couple of minutes, but you can make those changes. There you go. There you can see that that one was moved back to December 17th.
Still, if I want to get the full feature and functionality out of Todoist, such as using labels and adding comments, I have to come back here. I can't do that within my calendar. I can see the task, I can see what date it's on, but if I want to change those details I need to come back here into Todoist. So that is one of the key reasons why I don't just use Todoist. I don't use other dedicated task list managers because of the lack of seeing my events, seeing my calendar on the same screen.
Now a couple of other reasons why I choose not to use Todoist is that sometimes I find the AI features and some of the features that are meant to be helpful, I find can actually have a negative effect on our productivity.
So let me give you just a couple of examples. If you select the three dots here on the right-hand side of any task you get a number of options available to you here, and near the top we have some scheduling options here. Now the first one here is a suggested date as to when you should complete this task. Now I don't know all the factors that are going into the selection that Todoist is making. Now in this case, it's saying that this task is overdue. So this is probably a pretty straightforward one, right? That the suggested date should be today because it's no longer December 17th.
Let's click down to something else. Let's see if it gives us a different date. So this one it's saying not today. Even though it's due today, it's suggesting tomorrow. Maybe because it's a blog article about cute kitty cats. Maybe it's looking at the text and making that assessment here. Here's this proposal for a Florida client. It's saying today. So I'm sure there's some smart function going on here looking at things like maybe proposal and client, and here it saw that there was cats in the title, and that's why it's saying we would postpone that one a little further off into the future.
But again, when we start to rely on this, we start to often think that the computer or the artificial intelligence is smarter or knows something that we don't, and that's why I'm often cautious with this type of technology.
But there's something else I wanna point out here, and that's these two features here. The one is postpone to tomorrow, and the next one is next week as in postponing to next week. Now these are meant to make our lives easier. That in just a single click I can postpone this to the coming Monday, and I can postpone this to tomorrow, and of course, I can actually do this to multiple tasks at a time, especially if I have a bunch of things that I didn't get to yesterday. I can quickly bring everything to today or postpone them all to next week.
Well, that is precisely what I think is the problem. When we make it so easy to defer or postpone something, what I often find is that we no longer think clearly enough or carefully enough about the task itself, and I think, when it comes to deferring and moving our tasks around, you need to be careful. You need to put in some careful thought as to, you know what? Maybe I'm not gonna get to this today, but should I really defer it till next week? Just because it's so easy for me to do so. No, let me think more carefully about this. Maybe I need to actually block out some specific time because this particular task is so important.
I think there's something to be said to actually putting in a little bit more manual effort so that you're not so quick to defer things on your to-do list.
Now, like I said, I want to be very clear. My intention of today's video is not to try and convince you to stop using Todoist or to not use Todoist at all. I simply wanted to answer some of the most common questions available. I think there's a very good reason why Todoist is one of the most popular apps. If you go to the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, there's a reason why Todoist is always near the top of the productivity category.
But these are just some of the reasons why I choose not to do Todoist. With that, I'd love to hear from you next. Two things. Number one, if you are a Todoist user what do you love about Todoist? What are some of the features that you absolutely love? What are some of the reasons why you think others should consider Todoist? And I'd also love to hear the opposite. Are there some additional reasons why you don't use Todoist? And if not, what do you use as an alternative?
I would love to hear your answers in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to the Simpletivity channel. Be sure to give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment below.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
