A Student’s Guide to Todoist

Being a student can be stressful. Armed with the best of intentions at the start of the semester, it’s easy to promise yourself not to procrastinate: never missing a lecture and always working ahead. But with back-to-back lectures, endless readings, extended assignments, ten-page term papers, and time-intensive group projects…it’s challenging to stay afloat as you tread the deep waters of academic achievement. Coupled with the uncertainties of the ongoing pandemic and an (often) haphazard shift to online education and Zoom school, it’s easy to lose your hold on the semester ahead.

Before you know it, you’re condensing a semester’s worth of studying into a dread-filled 48 hours before an exam or going from choosing a topic to submitting your paper in one caffeine-fueled evening. Aside from the stress and the sleep deprivation, this state makes it harder to get what’s important out of the education experience: learning about interesting topics, making life-long friends, and carving out time to thoughtfully explore what we want to do when school is finished.

A full-fledged productivity system, powered by a digital task manager like Todoist, can help you strive towards A’s while also making time to balance everything else in life, too. We’ve written this Student’s Guide to Todoist to help anyone who wants to stay organized while in school –– whether you’re in junior high, high school, post-secondary, or graduate studies. This resource will help you establish a productivity system that captures your deadlines and exams dates, keeps your course load and assignments organized, and helps you use your time wisely in a way that a notebook or sticky notes just can’t — both for this semester, and the ones ahead.

Getting set up for the semester

Start thinking through the semester ahead, even before stepping into the classroom or logging into your first Zoom lecture. With your schedule set and syllabi shared, take some time to get organized for the months in front of you by creating Todoist projects for each class, capturing all your important dates and deadlines, and syncing your to-do list with your calendar.

Create projects for each class

Todoist allows you to set up different projects to add and organize related tasks. At the start of each semester, create a project for each of your courses –– for instance, one for BIOL 250 and another for BIOL 370.

Often, a class has different components like a lecture, lab, and seminar. You can organize these class components into separate sub-projects nestled under your main class project.

Add in Sections

Once you have a course project in Todoist, you can further subdivide that project into distinct parts using sections. For instance, you could divide a course into the following sections:

• Resources: Add this section at the top of a project and keep important documents and online resources a click away. For instance, under this section you can add a task that links to your syllabus, course website, professor’s contact details, online test resources, and more.
• Exam Dates: Never get caught off guard by an exam. Create a section to input all your key exam dates including quizzes, midterms, and finals.
• Assignment and Project Deadlines: Keep track of deadlines by adding due dates for upcoming assignments and projects to a dedicated section.
• Readings: Add readings to your course project in their own section. Add readings at the start of the semester, or week to week.
• Lecture Tasks: For all other catch-all and ongoing tasks, add them to a general “Lecture Tasks” section to keep your project clutter free and easy to navigate.

Capture all of your tasks, big and small

Now that you have all your classes accounted for in projects, go through every syllabus and course outline you receive and add tasks for each important exam, project, and paper. You can keep track of important deadlines by assigning a due date to each task.

You’ll end up with a clear overview of everything you’ll be responsible for throughout the semester. It may take a bit of time up front, but it will pay huge dividends in productivity and peace of mind as your workload ramps up.

Of course, no matter how meticulous you are in documenting your semester, new things pop up all the time. Todoist is available across ten platforms — including iOS and Android — making it easy to capture and organize tasks from anywhere. Add a new task to your to-do list on-the-go from your phone, then come back to it later on your computer. Keeping track of all your tasks in one place helps clear your mind and ensures that you won’t forget to finish something important.

Save websites to come back to later

You can easily add links to important resources for your upcoming paper or research project using the Todoist browser extensions for Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera. When you find a great source for your history assignment or biology paper, you can simply tap on the extension button, select “quick add task,” and “add website as task.” A new task will appear in the project you selected with a link right back to the resource so you can easily find it again later.

Sync your to-do list with your calendar

Do you keep track of important dates and deadlines with your calendar? You can get a bird’s eye view of your Todoist tasks inside your calendar, too. The Google Calendar and Todoist integration automatically adds all your Todoist tasks to your calendar and all your calendar events to Todoist as new tasks. Any changes to a task you make in your calendar, such as a date or time, will automatically be reflected in Todoist.

Turn on the Google Calendar integration by navigating to settings and then integrations while logged in to the Todoist web app.