I showed you earlier that Todoist supports natural language input. But let’s take a look at it again to make sure you’re using it to its full potential.

So, a quick overview of using natural language in Todoist:

• Use hashtags (#) to assign a to-do to a project.
• Use a slash (/) to immediately assign the to-do to a section within that project too.
• Use the at sign (@) to assign a label.
• Use p1, p2, p3, or p4 to assign a priority.
• To set a due date and time, just describe it in words. The same goes for setting up task repetition.

Fun fact: write an asterisk (*) at the start of a task to make it an uncompletable task.

Video Transcript

Let's do a little check-in here because we've really already come a long way. You've already come a long way. We have a really nice Todoist system. You're capturing your tasks from various sources, you're organizing them into areas and projects. You're planning your days, you're tracking deadlines, seeing what's coming up, maintaining your system with weekly reviews. You probably have integrated Todoist with your calendar app. Perhaps you're doing some habit tracking with Todoist and maybe you've integrated Todoist with other systems that you use as well, like Slack or Teams. So that's a lot of stuff and you're really set up well for success.

But there's a couple more things that we can do and I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about how to make, not talking about showing you, how to make Todoist a bit easier to use and also how to customize Todoist a little bit to your liking. So I wanna start by going over the natural language recognition again which I've shown you before, but I just kind of wanted to collect that all into this lesson so it's easy for you to refer back to, but also to reinforce what you've learned in the past.

So you know that with the keyboard circuit control command A which might be slightly different if you're on Windows, you can pull up quick add, and quick add supports natural language recognition. But really anywhere in Todoist where you create tasks, it supports natural language recognition.

So I just wanna go through once more how you do that. So I'm just gonna type A or hit A once I'm inside a project and here I am creative, in my creative video course on Todoist project. And actually, you know what, let's go see the inbox. Let's do it in the inbox right here, and then I'll add a task.

So let's say that I wanna do something which is I want to do a test recording to check the camera and audio, to check the video and audio quality. Let's say that's something I wanted to do when I was recording this course. Now I can type the hashtag symbol and search for video course. Create a video course on Todoist, boom, and then hit enter or return. And that will assign the to-do to that project. I can also use the at symbol to give it a label. For example, I could give it the waiting for label. Let's say I'm waiting on someone to help me with that or something like that. I could give it a priority by going P1 for example. Now you'll see that these things are starting to get filled in, right? I can type tomorrow, maybe this is something I wanna do tomorrow. You see how a lot of things are getting recognized. So all these fields are getting filled in, okay? And I can even get more specific.

In this create a video course on Todoist what I can do is I can do a slash and then I can say recording. And that allows me to assign the to do to the correct section within the project as well. So now if I add this task and we go take a look at it, here's this task. It's a priority one task for tomorrow with this waiting for a label assigned. It's listed under the recording segment in the correct project. That's pretty cool, right?

As of the time that I'm recording this there is also an experimental feature to set a reminder as well with natural language input. So I'm gonna actually go open my settings and then I'm gonna go to advanced. And if you're under advanced in settings you can see experimental features right here and you can turn that on. And what that does is it allows you to preview early versions of new features before others.

So now I'll click update and that's just gonna reload my Todoist. There we go. Now what I can do is I can actually when I'm creating a to do, I say wish Saby good luck with his workshop. Let's say my friend Saby, good luck with his workshop. Let's say he's giving a workshop tomorrow. I wanna set a reminder for doing this and I can use the exclamation mark and I can say 30 minutes. I think that's how that works. And so that, that gives me a reminder tomorrow or 30 minutes from now. Still tweaking the language on this. So I'll put a link to how that works. But you can hopefully by the time that you're watching this you can also assign custom time-based reminders like this by doing the exclamation mark.

Anyway, that was a quick refresher on how to do natural language input. It's really handy because at some point you're gonna get so good at this, even on mobile for example, when you're quickly entering a task, that it allows you to quickly put the task in the right area, set the correct, you know, due date, plan date, and so on. And that just means that you have less inbox processing to do during your weekly review. So that can be really handy.

Anyway, let's move on to a couple of other things that you can do to make Todoist easier to use and to make it more your own.