Todoist will automatically create the task so that you can check it off daily; when you check it off on Monday, Todoist automatically creates it again to be accomplished on Tuesday. For weekly tasks, you can type “pay kids allowance every Sunday.”. The solution is to create a packing list in Todoist in the same way as you create a project. Start with making a project for each of the groups of things you need to bring for your trip. The first item in the list to the left is my pre-departure checklist. Recently we featured a first look at the Todoist Preview for Windows 10, a new universal app set to launch in the not too distant future from the popular cross-platform service.The app itself was. Todoist is flexible enough to adapt to most workflows but not so complicated as to overwhelm. Overall, this is a great first to-do list app to try out, especially if you don't know where to start. Todoist integrates with Zapier, which means you can automatically create tasks in Todoist whenever something happens in one of your favorite apps.

I published a post a few days ago on How to Incorporate the GTD Methodology with Todoist and was overwhelmed with the response. Based on some questions/discussions that came up I wanted to follow up with a post going a little deeper into my GTD methods and Todoist setup.

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Here is the Getting Things Done Workflow Diagram that I’ll walk through below:

I mentioned in the previous post that I capture everything in Todoist, and this brought up some questions within the Todoist Made Simple community on Facebook. So to clarify…

Yes, I capture everything in Todoist, but not everything goes into the Todoist Inbox first. One person mentioned that it takes two seconds to assign categories and organize to-do list items in Todoist which makes the Todoist Inbox seem counterintuitive to the GTD method. And yes, I agree with this…about 90% of the time. If I’m sitting at my desk and focused on the work that I’m doing, I add in the task properly—assigning a project, label, priority, etc.

However, when I’m adding the task from email (forwarding the email to Todoist), I find it easier to add labels, assign projects, and set due dates after the task is in the Todoist Inbox. Also, if I’m in the middle of a meeting, and I want to add a task but also keep up with the conversation, I just add everything into the Todoist Inbox. Then later I can go through and process the Inbox tasks in bulk—adding in the detail needed to ensure each task goes to the proper place for handling later.

Let’s talk a little more about processing email

As I mentioned in the previous post, it takes me just 10-15 minutes each day to completely clear my email inbox. This was unthinkable for me prior to setting up this system.

Going through the GTD Workflow:

1. Is it actionable? ➡️ NO

• Eliminate: If no action is needed whatsoever, I delete it or file it as appropriate.
• Incubate: Rarely do I ever “incubate” anything from my email as described in the GTD Workflow chart. But for the sake of an example, let’s say I receive an email about a conference I might want to go to but I can’t make it this year for some reason. I would forward that email to my Todoist inbox. Then, as I’m processing my inbox, I would assign this task with the label @Someday/Maybe.
• Reference: Also, rarely do I file things from email. This was a very bad habit I used to have and I now try to avoid getting into this trap. I only file things from email if it’s something I absolutely need (certain attachments, like contracts, conversations that are part of a project that I may need to reference again until the project is complete, etc.).

2. Is it actionable? ➡️ YES

• Do it: If the email is actionable and can be done in less than 2 minutes, I do it immediately.
• Delegate it: If it’s something I can delegate to a team member, I do that immediately. **Here’s the additional tip with this one: For anything I delegate that I don’t want to forget about, I forward it to my Todoist Inbox. When I process my Inbox, I add a label @Waiting and make sure I include the name of the person I delegated it to in the task. Then, whenever I meet with a team member, I pull up my @Waiting list and search by the person’s name so I can check in on anything from that list while I have the chance.
• Defer it: For any email that requires action on my part and will take more than two minutes, I forward it to my Todoist Inbox. When I process the Inbox, I assign the task and label as appropriate.

Calendar Scheduling

Full disclosure: I do not follow this GTD practice. Here’s why…

I’ll admit that I’m not good with the GTD method of blocking off time on my calendar for actionable items. I tried this for a while and found myself getting frustrated. I’d get frustrated with people they interrupted me and caused my schedule to get thrown off. Or I’d get frustrated with myself if I inaccurately estimated the time a task would take. For example, one time I blocked off an hour on my calendar for a certain task. That amount of time should have been fine, but as I was working on the task, it morphed into something much bigger and took me something like 4-6 hours. This threw off my entire schedule for the day and caused me to have to reschedule a number of other tasks. The more things like this happened, I found myself completely disregarding the task-based calendar items, so I decided to stop following this practice and figure out a system that would work better for me.

How to Process Actionable Items:

When I first started using Todoist for GTD, I found that the number of items in my “Do Next” list got completely out of control. I was throwing everything onto that list. I needed a way to properly prioritize tasks in order to ensure that I was focused on the right things at the right times.

So, I figured out how to maximize the Todoist’s features to follow the basic ideas of GTD. If you read my last post, you’ve seen this breakdown already, but I’ll go into a little more detail on each of these items in the numbered list below):

1. Priority 1 — These tasks must happen on the date entered in the to-do item. This was my alternative to the calendar blocking method. This list is designed to catch any hard deadlines (i.e. a bill that’s due or a deliverable you promised someone on a specific date). And this list should be cleared out every single day.
   • For this, I set up a filter to show these items in a separate list so they wouldn’t get lost anywhere else. Any time I have a task that fits this criteria (hard deadline), I make sure to set the Todoist priority as P1, select a project, and set a deadline.
   • Then the filter that shows me this list is set up as: (overdue|tod) & p1 & !search: daily checklist
2. Priority 2 — This is the list of GTD “next actions”.
   • When a task is necessary for moving forward with a project, I set the Todoist priority as P2, select a project, and set a deadline if needed. Really, if it’s a hard deadline it should be handled as #1 above. If I set a deadline in a P2 item, it’s more like my suggested day to work on this.
   • The filter for this list is set up as: p2 & !(#daily list – scpa|) & (overdue|tod|no date) & !(@Waiting💤|@Discuss🗣️)
3. Priority 3 — These are items that should get done at some point, maybe after other “next actions.” I also include in here those items people throw at me here and there, “We should do this…” (when I know the idea is simply something to explore when there’s time.
   • For Priority 3 items, I set the priority as P3 and select a project. P3 items (in my system) should never have a due date. If it’s something that should be done by a certain time, it should be P1 or P2.
   • The filter for this list is set up as: p3 & !(@Discuss🗣️|@Waiting💤) & !(#daily checklist|#daily list – scpa) & !(@Watch📺|@Read📚|@Listen🎧)
4. Priority 4 — Did you notice my watch/read/listen labels above? Those are items I typically store under the Todoist priority P4 (which is actually the same as no priority level set). This is what I use for informational stuff (reading/podcasts/videos) and really vague ideas/suggestions that get sent my way and need more thought or research put into them before they can be an actual task.
   • The filter for this list is set up as: p4 & !(@Discuss🗣️|@Waiting💤) & !(#daily checklist|#daily list – scpa)

NOTE: I do have some additional labels in my filters above that I removed from the examples. I chose to exclude those to make the instructions as clear as possible for anyone who might want to replicate these filters for their own needs.

For items that are not immediately actionable, I have labels and filters set up so, for example, when I’m traveling I can pull up my list of items to read/listen/watch (@Watch📺|@Read📚|@Listen🎧) or when I need a break from work in the middle of the day I can pull up my “Lunch Break” list and try to tackle some lower priority personal items like making an appointment.

Perfecting Your System Takes Time But It’s Totally Worth It

One thing that’s SUPER important to note here is that building a system like this with checklists and labels and prioritization is not easy. It takes time (and patience and persistence).

When I first set everything up, I had to double check things often and from different angles to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. And when I discovered anything that got lost in an incorrect list (which happened a lot at first), I would make tweaks to the system and continue to double check everything. I repeated this over and over for a few weeks until I felt completely comfortable with the system I’d built.

I even implemented some recurring to-do list items when I recognized that they would be helpful to ensure that I would catch things that could be catastrophic if they were missed. For example, I have a recurring task set up to check for anything set as P1 that doesn’t have a set due date. This is because if something is P1, it needs to be done on a certain day. And I discovered that if a date isn’t set in that task, it won’t show up in my “Do Today” list because it’s technically not “overdue” or due “today.” I needed to make sure I wouldn’t lose track of high priority items like this.

As you set up and test your system, be on the lookout for simple hacks like this that will give you confidence in your own system so you can be productive and stress free (which is the whole purpose)!

The Guided GTD Weekly Review

Todoist Daily Checklist Template

Here’s another GTD bonus that will help as you learn how to practice the methodology and perfect your system: Podcast Episode #7 – The Guided GTD Weekly Review:

If you’d like to start getting more organized, increase your productivity, and feel overall on top of your game, I highly recommend purchasing a copy of Getting Things Done and giving Todoist a try! (You can sign up for Todoist for free. If you want to upgrade to the Premium plan, it starts at just $3/month!)

For some people, pen and paper work fine for keeping track of their daily tasks, while others might need a helpful to-do list app to support them in the day-to-day.

Whether you’re a busy entrepreneur with several teams to manage, a freelancer with a handful of clients, or simply someone who needs help organizing various life segments, there is definitely a checklist app out there made just for you. We hope that this list of tools will help you find the best to-do list app suitable to your needs and preferences.

Here, we cover 12 to-do list apps for using individually or with your team:

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1. Todoist

Price: Free | Premium from $3/month

Works on: Android, Windows, macOS, iPhone and iPad, Web

Todoist is a famous daily checklist app that works great for professional and personal tasks or both – you can add different labels and colors to separate your work assignments from house and family-related tasks.

Todoist will help split up your projects and sort them according to their priority, whether you’re on your phone or the computer. You can set several priority levels, track due dates, and a lot more to stay efficient in your day-to-day. The great thing about Todoist is that it lets you see not only the day’s tasks but also what you need to accomplish for the following week or month, motivating you to reach your goals.

Todoist’s interface is similar to Gmail — you simply add items to your task list, add subtasks or mark favorites. It’s simple to move the task to another day or mark it done.

Awesome features:

• Various preset templates, e.g., for goal tracking, organizing finances, social media calendar, meeting agenda, and others
• Getting “Karma points” for completing tasks on time and growing your karma over time

2. Any.do

Price: Free | Premium from $2.09/month

Works on: Android, iPhone, Web

When it comes to handy user interface and design, Any.do may be one of the best daily to-do list apps out there. You can drag and drop tasks to change their order or priority level, swipe tasks to mark them complete, and add tasks through voice command. To differentiate among projects or segments of life, use categories or themes.

Features like deleting the tasks by shaking your phone give this to-do list app a really modern look and pleasant feel. Any.do also offers awesome reminders that you can set to go off at a certain time and even in a location of your choice, like home or work. Also, Any.do can help you plan your day by browsing your tasks and suggesting when to complete them.

Any.do is also irreplaceable as a calendar app, which seamlessly integrates with your Google Calendar, iCloud, Outlook, or any other calendar. In addition to everything already mentioned, this awesome checklist app can spot your missed phone calls and remind you about them.

Awesome features:

• A preset grocery list that won’t let you forget different product categories
• Morning notification about your plans for the day
• The option to assign tasks to others

3. TickTick

Price: Free | Premium from $2.4/month

Works on: Android, Windows, macOS, iPhone and iPad, Web

Just like most daily and weekly checklist apps, TickTick allows you to add tasks, subtasks, reminders, deadlines, and recurring tasks for the day, week, or month. The great thing about this to-do list app is that it gives you the choice of five different calendar views to see which view motivates you best.

It’s super convenient to add tasks to TickTick, using not only texts but also voice commands and widgets. You can even turn an email into to-do list items! This simple and excellent daily checklist app even lets you assign tasks and share lists with others.

Awesome features:

• Location-based reminder settings
• The option to turn emails from your inbox into tasks
• “Annoying alert” feature to make sure you don’t miss an important meeting or task

4. Microsoft To Do

Price: Free

Works on: Android, Windows, iPhone, and iPad

Microsoft To Do is a simple to-do list app that lets you plan for anything – whether it’s organizing your grocery lists, must-see movies, planning a trip, or your workflow. You can manage priorities by using tags like #1, #2, #3 or #urgent, #medium, #low, and then sort the tasks in a way you find convenient. This to-do list app is pretty straightforward and mainly aimed at personal use rather than effective team collaboration.

Microsoft To Do is also the most logical choice for a checklist app if you’re a Microsoft Suite user. It’s effortless to import and sync tasks from other Microsoft apps and even turn Outlook emails into tasks.

Awesome features:

• Sharing to-do lists with family, friends, or colleagues
• List customization by choosing a different background for each

5. OmniFocus

Price: Free | Premium from $9.99/month

Works on: macOS, iPhone, iPad, Web

OmniFocus is a flexible to-do list app suitable even for the most complex and unconventional organizational systems. This tool lets you set up three different types of projects and view them in six default views, allowing you to organize tasks according to their tags, due dates, a specific order, etc. Even more views and options are available in the Pro version of this versatile to-do list app.

OmniFocus is no simple to-do list app – this feature-packed tool answers even the most specific workflow organization needs. It’s definitely one of the best daily to-do list apps for power users and people with particular time management needs. The app offers deep integration across all Apple devices, ensuring you never miss a deadline.

Awesome features:

• Custom perspectives to group similar actions together
• A handy sharing menu to easily add items from any app

6. Bear App

Price: Free | Premium from $1.25/month

Works on: iPhone, iPad, and Mac (basic functionality available on Android)

Bear App is a beautiful tool for taking notes, combined with a to-do list app. It allows you to make lists, create checklists, add detail to your tasks, and take extensive notes.

iOS (and Premium plan) users can benefit from importing content into the Bear app, for example, share content from other apps, capture webpages, drag and drop from other apps, and even add notes by talking to your Apple Watch. Bear app’s pro version also offers many beautiful themes.

Awesome features:

• Rich text editing with great design and diverse typography options
• Progress bar under each note that fills up as you check off to-dos, giving you the visual queue of each task’s progress

7. Google Keep

Price: Free

Works on: Android, iPhone and iPad, Web

If you don’t need all the bells and whistles of a sophisticated task management app, Google Keep offers a simple and straightforward way to organize your life. With this free to-do list app, it takes an instant to jot something down in a note, add an image or a voice memo to it and then share e.g., a grocery list with your partner.

You can choose to type in a note the traditional way or use the handwriting feature. You can transform any note you’ve written into a checklist with one click. You can choose from 12 colors to highlight the note and drag the notes around (or pin them) to see the most topical ones on top. You can add a custom reminder to each note and even choose if you receive the reminder at home, work, or another location.

As a Google app, it’s synced with all Google products; for example, you can easily copy your notes to Google Docs, send or share them. You can also add collaborators to your notes to edit or check off the list items together in real-time.

Awesome features:

• The voice memo feature will not only record but also transcribe your words
• You can draw on any photo, color or highlight it

8. Habitica

Price: Free

Works on: Android, iPhone and iPad, Web

Habitica is a habit-building and daily to-do list app which turns tasks and to-do lists into a role-playing game and lets you earn points for achieving goals. This app is a great tool for those who find planning and organizing their lives boring and tedious. Why not turn it all into a game?

The app resembles a game right from the start where you have to create an avatar for yourself. Then you can either select from the preset habits and goals like “Eat less junk food”, “5 minutes of quiet breathing,” or add your own tasks. When you check tasks off, your character gains health or experience and some gems and gold along the way. If you fail or ignore your tasks, you lose powers and health.

Awesome features:

• Give custom rewards to yourself for reaching a certain goal or level
• The option to share your tasks with friends for extra motivation

9. Ayoa

Price: Free | Premium from $10.95/month

Works on: Android, Windows, macOS, iPhone and iPad, Web

Ayoa is more than a daily checklist app, in fact, its creators call it “mind map software”, which entails visualizing your ideas and transforming them into exact actions. This app is great for visually-oriented people looking for a more beautiful and multi-dimensional way to organize their thoughts, rather than using a simple list. You can choose to display your tasks and projects in different (and beautiful!) ways, like a Radial map, Canvas view, Whiteboard, Kanban board, a “regular” mind map, and many others.

It’s a versatile task management app for individual or team use to collaborate on projects, tasks, and to-do items with the help of checklists and whiteboards. Ayoa makes managing your to-do list and collaborating on it a fun process in itself.

Awesome features:

• Creative project management enabling the creation of ideation plans
• Instant messaging with Ayoa chat
• The “now, next, soon” planning feature

Todoist Daily Checklist Printable

10. Memorigi

Price: Free | Premium from $1.99/month

Works on: Android

Memorigi is a beautiful to-do list app, task planner, calendar, and reminder app with many features designed to keep yourself accountable when working towards your goals.

Memorigi not only lets you keep track of your daily tasks, ideas, and activities, but also motivates you to follow life goals and build habits. It also offers useful features like cloud sync, recurring tasks, and reminders.

You can quickly schedule and reorganize your tasks and lists using swipe gestures; make notes; and analyze your statistics to keep track of your personal, work, or school projects.

Awesome features:

• The “Nag me” feature for continually reminding you of your uncompleted tasks
• Attachments for safely storing your tasks, documents, lists, and photos
• Dark mode

11. Remember The Milk

Price: Free | Premium from $3.33/month

Works on: Android, iPhone and iPad, Web

Remember The Milk is a simple to-do list app that helps to create organized and colorful lists. What started as a simple grocery shopping list, as the name suggests, has expanded into a decent time management and daily checklist app. Besides creating lists, it lets you connect to other apps like Gmail, Outlook, and Google Calendar and receive reminders in various ways, by email, text, IM, or even -Twitter.

Remember The Milk’s smart listings help you to identify all your due dates for the week. It may be one of the best personal to-do list apps, as it focuses more on handy tagging and smart list features rather than organizing projects and subtasks.

Awesome features:

• Automated task prioritization
• Smart sentence recognition that lets you write out the details and due dates in one line using natural language
• Simple and intuitive UI

12. Chaos Control

Price: Free | Premium starts from $2.40/month

Works on: Android, Windows, macOS, iPhone and iPad, Web

Chaos Control is a daily checklist app based on a slightly different approach (namely the Get Things Done methodology or GTD) than most daily to-do list apps. Instead of only focusing on your day-to-day tasks, the app creators invite you to start by writing down a desired result or outcome, turning it into a project with a corresponding list of actions. You can then use folders to organize your projects into categories.

This app doesn’t have an elaborated design, but it provides a solid functionality that helps to organize your goals, tasks, and schedules in a way that lets you see how each step you take affects the big picture. You can also sync your projects and tasks across Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

Awesome features:

• One of the very few GTD philosophy apps out there
• Very simple and straightforward UI

Todoist Daily Checklists

Which to-do list app do you fancy?

We hope this list helped you find the best personal to-do list app for taking control over your daily tasks. If you find it hard to choose, test several options since all of these awesome checklist apps have free versions.

We all know that nothing gives more satisfaction than ticking off completed tasks from a to-do list. So we wish you good luck and lots of fun completing your daily tasks and reaching your goals!

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