Working With Todoist: The Book. Why I wrote it.

I’ve just published a book. It’s a book about my favourite application and it’s a book I have spent the last ten months writing and I’ve loved every minute of the process.

In this week’s blog post I want to share with you why I wrote the book, and what’s in the book, and hopefully I can covert you to joining the millions of others who have found Todoist and have used it to become better organised and more productive and of course perhaps persuade you to buy a copy.

At the end of 2015, I decided I wanted to tell everyone about the fantastic productivity app, Todoist. Since I got into digital productivity in 2009, I have tried many of the different productivity apps in the App Store, and none of them really managed to keep me organised and on top of my work and life, and at the same time inspire me to get more work done and stay organised. Only Todoist managed to do that. With its beautiful user interface, logical workflow and immense flexibility, to me this app was the stuff dreams were made of. And I wanted to tell the whole world about it.

But how does an English teacher in South Korea tell the world about an app? I decided the best way to do this was to start a YouTube channel to show as many people as possible how to use Todoist and some of the tricks and tips I had learnt from using it for over 18 months. That channel grew, in fact it grew far better and faster than I ever imagined. I never realised there were so many people who were using Todoist and wanted to get more out of it. The comments and fantastic questions left on the channel helped me to improve my use and show people more great ways to get Todoist working for them. I am so grateful to all my subscribers, those guys have really inspired me.

Because I love writing, I decided the next step in my desire to spread the news about Todoist was to write a book. I know not everyone wants to watch YouTube videos, and I know my production skills are not in the same league as Sam Mendes or even many of my fellow YouTubers, so I began writing ten months ago and finally after a hectic three days, during the long Lunar New Year holiday here in Korea editing and formatting, the book was finished and published.

In the book, I have gone through how you can set up Todoist, use all the amazing features and get yourself organised and on top of everything. I am sure I managed to get in almost everything there is to know about Todoist, how it works and how you can organise it so it fits into your way of working.

The book starts with the basics of setting up projects and creating tasks, then it moves on to labelling, flags and filters. And if that isn’t enough, it then delves deeper in the second part of the book and goes though some of the more advanced features that will very quickly turn you in to a fully fledged expert with Todoist.

I have written this book because I want everyone to find, learn and use the fantastic Todoist everyday of their lives. It can help change your life by bringing order out of chaos and by helping you see the way forward to achieving the things you want to achieve in your life.

I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this book. It has taken me ten months to write and the whole process has taught me a lot about Todoist and myself. Two other writing projects came up last year that had tighter deadlines and involved working with other people. I had to make decisions about what should be done and when. I learnt to better prioritise and still allow myself time each week to write this book. It took longer than I planned (about two months longer), but the effort was worth it.

The biggest takeaway for me from this experience is that priorities are always shifting, and it is important to be flexible enough to allow for those shifts in priorities. You can always put a project on hold while you work on another, higher priority project, but you should always come back to the original project. Doing a little bit each week. Perseverance and a determination to get a project finished is always going to be the key ingredients for a completed project like writing a book or filming a short film. Far too many great ideas and projects fail to complete because they are not returned to when something else becomes a priority. Don’t give up a great idea just because something else temporarily become the priority.

Throughout the whole process, Todoist was always there to keep nudging me every Friday to write a little more of the book. I didn’t have to do anything special, all I needed was to create a weekly repeating task telling me to “continue writing Todoist book”. I never failed to write something. Sometimes is was as much as 1,000 words, other times it was only 100. But I kept going and Todoist gently reminded me every week. It was a nice break from the pressure of working towards other people’s deadlines too. I made sure I had no other writing to do on a Friday except the Todoist book and it was a wonderful experience.

So, whether you are an occasional user of Todoist, a seasoned user, or if you feel a bit lost and not sure what you need to do and want something to point you in the right direction, then this book, and Todoist, is for you. You can buy a copy either from Apple’s iBooks, Amazon Kindle or directly through my website. Go on, treat yourself.

Carl Pullein is the author of Your Digital Life: Everything you need to know to get your life organised and put technology to work for you, a book about how to get yourself organised in the twenty-first century, as well as Working With Todoist: The Book. Get started with Todoist so you can get better organised and achieve greater productivity.