Using Todoist as a visual daily planner
At the core of my entire workflow is Todoist’s Today view. This is where I live. No filters, no smart queries, I just drag stuff between times of day and hope I don’t stack two meetings on top of each other again like I did last Thursday 🙃
I use the mobile app at night to brain-dump tomorrow into the Inbox. That’s the ritual—lay in bed, scroll through Slack or Google Calendar until some guilt hits, then open Todoist and smash out 7–10 tasks with zero structure. Most people try to clean Inbox ASAP, but I way prefer doing that with a keyboard in the morning. So I leave them there.
Fast forward to the next morning. I don’t make coffee before Inbox Zero. Not the email one—the Todoist one. I sit down, grab all the tasks, and either delete them (half of them were silly like “look up if Costco sells chicken feet”—???) or schedule them properly. That’s when I start dragging.
The drag-and-drop time assignment in Today view is underrated. It’s the closest thing to time blocking without having to actually use a calendar, which always ends up out of sync with real life anyway. So I’ll pull up the task like “Finish blog draft about Google Sheets error handling,” and park it right after lunch because I know that’s when I have the most brain space.
Key part: I color code by project. Red = writing, blue = admin, gray = errands, green = automation builds that will probably never finish. That helps me catch the overlaps visually. If I see three red tasks in the same two-hour window, I know I’m being delusional again.
One time, I actually created a separate project called “Delusional Tasks” 🙈 Anything I expect to take under 5 min goes straight there. Spoiler: Nothing takes under 5 min. That’s how I learned to start padding my daily plan.
Anyway, just organizing like a visual calendar inside Todoist’s Today pane is enough for most overlap prevention. The real issue starts when something silently fails—like when Google Calendar sync stops updating but doesn’t throw any errors.
Preventing overlapping tasks using Google Calendar sync
So technically, Todoist has a built-in two-way sync with Google Calendar. But one weird catch: If you create a task and assign it a time (like 1:30 PM), but don’t assign it to a synced project, it won’t show on your calendar. And the app won’t remind you that something’s missing. It just… disappears from that layer.
That’s how I ended up with two different dentist appointments scheduled for the same afternoon and never realized it until one started calling me like a debt collector.
To fix that, I created a dedicated project called “Calendar Synced.” Every task that ends up with a real-world constraint (meeting, call, appointment, pickup, whatever) goes in there. That project is linked 1:1 to Google Calendar, where the event block reflects the task’s time in Todoist.
Important part: You can only link a project to one specific calendar. So if you run separate calendars for Work and Personal, you’ll probably have to split the Calendar Synced project into two. I didn’t. I just color-coded inside Google Calendar (again—blue = work, orange = personal, etc.) and everything still renders correctly.
But even with this in place, sometimes things just go missing. No error. Calendar stops showing new tasks. Usually, it’s because you edited the task time too many times in one day and the sync silently fails. I confirmed this by hitting Cmd+Z a few times on day edits, waiting a few mins, and still nothing changed on Google Calendar.
My workaround? I created a filter in Todoist called “Calendar Missing” with the rule: `@calendar & !due:today` — which basically flags anything that hasn’t updated to the calendar when it should have. Then I delete and re-create the task from scratch if I care enough.
Making templates that avoid multi-task collisions
I fell into that “productivity porn” rabbit hole again last month. You know, those YouTube videos where people promise you life-changing template hacks that somehow involve Notion, an iPad, and seventeen colors of highlighter.
A lot of people use recurring tasks wrong in Todoist. Like, they’ll set five things to repeat ‘every day’ and just blip them out of the way. But if you run them as auto-populating templates—for example, replicate a three-step podcast edit process every Monday—that’s where it gets smarter.
Here’s how I set this up:
– I created a project called “Weekly Rhythms.” Not a template, an actual project.
– Inside, each task is something predictable I need to do weekly, color-coded by type.
– Tasks are recurring, like:
– “Check Zapier error logs” every Monday 9:00 AM
– “Export client reports” every Thursday 3:00 PM
– Then I filtered these into a Today-only view so it doesn’t overload the main list.
What avoiding overlaps here means is—don’t set five things to trigger at 9:00 AM if you really meant to do them one at a time. I do small 30-minute offsets. Even a fake one helps. Something like:
– Task A at 9:00
– Task B at 9:45
– Task C at 10:15
Even if I do them out of order, the visual stacking in Today view makes it obvious that I scheduled time for them. And when I don’t do this? They all appear under the same time bracket, I panic, reschedule three of them for ‘tomorrow,’ and repeat that for the next five days 🙄
One neat trick: If you name tasks consistently (e.g., always start them with a verb), it helps when you want to batch-reschedule later using search.
How I test my daily plan for gaps or overlap
I only do one actual sanity check—on Sundays—using a blank Google Calendar overlay called “Dry Run.” Sounds fancy, but it’s dumb-easy: I dump my most structured tasks into this blank calendar and space them out by hand.
Then, I pretend to live that week in 10 minutes. I sit down, walk through every block, say to myself, “Okay, at 1 PM Tuesday I’ve got this deliverable…” and wait until the mental fumbles start. Usually there’s a point where I go, “Wait, didn’t I put a dentist thing also at 1 PM?” and yeah, overlap detected 😛
This helps me prevent those “back-to-back but 10 miles apart” type scheduling disasters. It won’t catch system errors—but it catches the human ones I seem to repeat weekly.
Last thing I sometimes do is look at the ‘Next 7 Days’ view and right-click any task that has a time conflict. Todoist doesn’t warn you if tasks overlap. You just have to catch them like a weird hawk in open tabs. No pop-up. No double-booking alert. Nothing.
So I use a color trigger for anything urgent. Red = can’t be late. If I see two reds in the same bracket, I instantly reschedule one. Even if I don’t like doing it. Color guilt is a real thing.
I’ve reported this as feedback twice, and they still haven’t added a conflict alert feature. Maybe it’s by design. Maybe Todoist assumes your future self will “figure it out.”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯