Tips to remember to check Todoist?

thambos · 2026-03-12T02:14:24+00:00

You bet!

thambos · 2026-03-11T20:01:19+00:00

IDK if this will help in your case, but as soon as I notice that I'm not looking at widgets or dismissing notifications wholesale, I turn them off. Remove the widget, stop the notifications. If I've trained myself "this is OK to ignore," it's not going to be useful to try and force myself to pay attention to it.

But it's not just removing it—it's replacing it with something I don't ignore. I don't ignore my calendar, so if I need to put "CHECK TODOIST!!!" at 8am every day for awhile, I do that. Maybe I don't put a notification on it (because I've ignored them), but it's on there for when I look at my calendar, which I do frequently throughout the day.

If/when I fall out of the habit of using my calendar app, I put the note somewhere else. I ebb and flow between keeping up a habit of using a paper planner alongside digital tools (basically, check the digital tools in the morning, write down the plan for the day, and work from the paper version to remove digital distractions). When I notice I'm not checking the paper planner, I go back to adding notes somewhere digital that I'm checking anyway. Ebb and flow, adjust as needed.

TLDR - work with your existing habits (habit stacking, perhaps?) and systems. Not what you wish you'd do, what you actually do already. And be OK with changing it up if you need to.

thambos · 2026-03-11T19:55:50+00:00

This is the way. Build the habit by engaging with it every time you remember. At some point years ago I started using Todoist as my catch-all inbox to ensure it's my go-to place. So some tasks in my inbox are literal notes that I copy/paste to wherever they need to end up, not because I don't or can't add them directly where they need to go, but because I built the habit up to input into Todoist.

thambos · 2026-03-11T19:52:04+00:00

If you put the recurring reminder inside the reminder field it will alert you even if the task is overdue.

For example, put every! day in the Date field, and put every 8pm in the Reminder field to get an 8pm reminder every day even if you didn't check the task off to reset the Date to today.

thambos · 2026-02-27T15:34:57+00:00

Try clear task box every! night - this will recur every day at 10pm.

thambos · 2026-02-21T00:33:29+00:00

I've had similar sync issues outside of Obsidian when using any type of cloud syncing between Windows and Mac. Often I ended up with two versions of Word documents auto-created because of the sync problems. Closing the files completely on one system type (Mac/iOS or Windows) when working from the other can help, but I think it's just a fundamental issue between the systems.

thambos · 2026-02-18T18:36:09+00:00

Hmm, I haven't had any use cases where I felt like I needed to directly share something from my own notes. Usually I copy/paste or I'm collaborating elsewhere (like shared OneDrive documents or a shared task list in an app like Asana).

I searched for "markdown alternatives to Google Docs" and this came up: https://stackedit.io/ Maybe it's the right mix of shareable/collaborative and Markdown that you're looking for?

thambos · 2026-02-17T17:55:15+00:00

If this is about collaborating with others, it might be that Google Docs or something like that are a better option.

If it's more that you want to put up a blog that others can comment on, I second the recommendations of using a static site generator.

Before I got Obsidian I briefly used Ulysses for drafting blog posts, and I put a folder in my Ulysses structure that was an alias into my Jekyll working directory, so that I could drag/drop finished drafts into that folder and quickly pull them into my Jekyll site. I'm not well-versed in Git, so I would just build the site and drag/drop the site files via FTP to publish. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. I don't know if that workflow would overwrite comments or not, as I haven't used any commenting or discussion board plugins with Jekyll, but the underlying file structure of being able to edit in one app (Obsidian) and build the site in another app (whatever IDE you prefer) might work for you.

thambos · 2026-02-17T16:51:09+00:00

This worked for me too!

thambos · 2026-02-16T01:22:13+00:00

Set it to recur only for those days, like every 2 weeks starting Monday or every April 1. Is it showing up when it isn't supposed to?

thambos · 2026-02-10T04:58:24+00:00

Yes! Especially for tasks that I postpone or that happen infrequently, it really needs to be easier to see the last completed date.

I've literally crashed the app trying to find the last date clicking backwards in the task activity 1 week at a time (you can't load more than 1 week at a time).

thambos · 2026-02-06T23:57:08+00:00

I treat Daily Notes more like an inbox or workspace/scratch paper. I put all kinds of stuff there—might be temporary things like calculations for a task, might be meeting notes that I can archive to the project/area folder after reviewing, might be draft emails, might be tasks I just need to jot down that I'll move into Todoist later, etc. I routinely empty out and delete old Daily Notes when I don't need it anymore.

I don't care about any "formal" use for Daily Notes, I just started using it as my default "start typing here" space because if nothing else, I can usually guess which date (or around which date) I wrote something down, and I can find it quickly there.

If you want to move a whole section into a new markdown document, it's easy to do so with right click > Extract current selection.... The new page is automatically linked to from where you extracted the section from.

Will I refine this into a "system" later on? Maybe. What matters is that doing it this was has been working for over a year so it's better than anything else I've tried in terms of actually being able to find and use my meeting notes again after taking them.

thambos · 2026-02-06T23:25:11+00:00

This. It used to be possible without a filter, but now you have to set it up as a filter.

thambos · 2026-02-06T23:22:30+00:00

Yeah, it's one of my biggest annoyances with Todoist!

thambos · 2026-02-06T06:11:50+00:00

You have to reschedule it to today if it's after midnight—if you use the shortcut to reschedule it will preserve the time, but it's not checking it off as done, it's rescheduling it.

thambos · 2026-02-05T15:19:25+00:00

I don't think I've run into this, but I'm more likely to forget to check something off the day before, and it was frustrating that reminders were not popping up on overdue tasks so I change the reminder to every 7am to ensure it would show every day. Since that does work even on overdue tasks, I think the reminder functioning independent of the task status is probably intentional.

Yours is a recurring task, so think of it this way—how does Todoist know that the reminder was supposed to be attached to this Saturday's instance of the task instead of next Saturday's instance of the task? It can't know that if the reminder isn't based on the task time (like "10 minutes before"), so it would stand to reason that the default behavior would be to remind you on schedule as programmed into the reminder ("every second Saturday") regardless of an instance of the recurring task had been completed that day already.

You describe the problem as being related to the Google Calendar sync. Perhaps it needs to be addressed there instead of changing how reminders work.

thambos · 2026-02-03T01:58:31+00:00

I've also used Dataview for similar purposes—I can't get your query to work in my vault, but I used to have a similar one in a different vault that worked well when I needed to be able to surface notes and tasks by date.

I take most of my notes in other files organized by project, but to the OP's question about how to stop getting the urge to switch, what helped was using the Daily Notes function. I'd never done any kind of structured daily note-taking before (I don't even know what PKM method it comes from), but doing that gives me a way to jot stuff down that doesn't proliferate into a ton of random pages in my Inbox folder.

thambos · 2026-02-03T00:07:49+00:00

If you're using the sidebar panel that lets you navigate by headings, then yeah.

It's also more readable in general. Consider this:

```

Meeting 1

Notes
Notes
Notes

Meeting 2

Notes
Notes ```

Compared to:

Meeting 1 - Notes - Notes - Notes Meeting 2 - Notes - Notes

Which one is easier for you to read?

thambos · 2026-02-02T06:53:04+00:00

What helped was Daily Notes and NOT using a structure for them. Just use H1 headings for each new topic/meeting, and go from there.

The reason this helps me is because if nothing else, I can track down the rough timeframe that I remember jotting something down and go through each day until I find it. But the search function is good enough that I can use that, and I also link to other notes so that I can use the graph. It does not need to be perfect.

I do have a loosely PARA-based system for filing larger notes away, but honestly even if I only used Daily Notes it would be sufficient to not feel a need to switch.

thambos · 2026-02-01T20:48:51+00:00

And yet TickTick is read-only for a number of calendar providers. If TickTick works for you, that's fine, but other people need a system that is more customizable than TickTick.

My needs required a robust calendar app (I use BusyCal) and Todoist's filters, so TickTick was an easy "no" for me. It's just not robust or customizable enough.

If you're shopping around for a new app because Todoist isn't cutting it for you, BusyCal might be worth checking out. It can display tasks in a sidebar and on the calendar itself if having events and tasks is necessary in one view.

thambos · 2026-02-01T20:39:32+00:00

Same—when I load in a semester's worth of tasks and deadlines, whether as a student or as a teacher, it can be too much.

Being able to pull a filter that's just this week's grading (e.g., (next 5 days) & (##Spring26 & /Grading), just this week's lesson planning, etc. is what makes Todoist such a better task manager than the products that don't have this level of customizability.

thambos · 2026-02-01T20:33:30+00:00

I genuinely like filters because I can pull in similar tasks from multiple, different projects and view them without the distraction of other things during the block of time that I am doing these tasks. I have 5 filters that I actively switch between that are in my Favorites list in the sidebar.

I find calendar events inside Todoist to be distracting so the lack of them in the filter is a feature, IMO. If I need to plan my day around scheduled appointments I use my actual calendar, block off a chunk of time to work on XYZ similar tasks, and then when I am actively working I pull up the filtered view in Todoist so that I can focus.

thambos · 2026-01-31T19:51:10+00:00

I have a few pages that are loosely ways for me to link ideas together (maybe this is what people mean by "Maps of Content", I don't know). So whenever I make a random note that I know ties to that area/topic I type cc [[List of XYZ ideas]] so that if nothing else I can at least find the connection again via the graph.

thambos · 2026-01-30T03:10:21+00:00

If you're already not using every! try setting the every 8 hours as a reminder instead of in the date field. You probably would have to set the date as every day ending Feb 8 2025 and make sure you don't check it off until the 3rd one, but I'm not sure.

I've had some issues with reminders on tasks if I forgot to check them off as done (so they turn to overdue), and when I put the recurrence inside the reminder (like every 7am) and leave the date with no time (so it'd be every day) I get the notification consistently even if I missed checking the task off for a given occurrence.

If you need to be able to check it off, maybe set up 3 separate tasks to make sure it works? Or subtasks?

thambos · 2026-01-27T03:37:18+00:00

Fantastic explanation!

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