Understanding how todoist priority flags behave
When I first started with Todoist, the priority flags looked like decoration more than anything else. They are just little colored icons you can stick on tasks. But the behavior changes fast once you start drowning in overdue items. For beginners, here is the basic translation: red is the loudest, blue or purple is quieter, and the grays are basically a shrug. What that means when you look at your Today view is that Todoist will group those colors in order, so the red ones stay parked at the top whether you like it or not. The thing nobody tells you is that even if a task is overdue and it does not have a flag, it will still sit beneath the flagged urgent stuff. That detail messed with me until I finally dragged things around and saw the rules in action. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One quirk to note is that you can set these flags while you are typing a task using the exclamation mark shortcut. Type something like `!!1` when adding a task and it will slap on the highest urgency red flag. It feels faster than clicking with the mouse, especially if you are the kind of person who is constantly dumping ten tasks in at once. But sometimes Todoist will swallow that shortcut and the task ends up plain with no flag at all. I still do not know what triggers that bug, but if you see tasks mysteriously losing their colors, try adding them after the task already exists. That usually sticks.
When do the flags actually matter
The big secret here is that flags do not matter all the time. They matter mainly in certain filtered views or in the Today or Upcoming list. If you always hang out in a custom filter with fifteen conditions, a plain overdue task marked as priority three can actually sink lower than you expect. What I did to test this was create a new filter showing all overdue tasks across projects. Without flags, the result list just sorts by date. The moment I flagged three of those tasks red, they all jumped right to the top of the screen. It was the same data, just reordered.
That reordering saved me from a headache one morning because my inbox had tons of random bits like phone bills, blog drafts, and half-finished Zapier fixes. Since I had flagged “renew hosting plan” with red the night before, it showed up first the next day and I weirdly did not get the late penalty I usually do. That was the moment I realized the flags are not cosmetic stickers, they really change what you see when you are half awake and scanning your lists over coffee. 🙂
Building a simple flag system that sticks
The problem most people get lost in is thinking they need to design a color system worthy of NASA. I tried three different flag systems before something clicked. Here is the table that shows what finally worked:
“`
Priority Level Color Meaning in my setup
High Red Must do this today, no exceptions
Medium Orange Should do today, but if it slips I will live
Low Blue Nice to handle this week, not urgent
None Gray Placeholder or thought dump
“`
What made this system stick for me was writing down actual examples. A red task is like “Submit invoice to client X.” An orange task is “Draft headline ideas.” A blue task is “Watch that tutorial on keyboard shortcuts.” The gray ones are random ideas that I might delete next week. Without attaching real examples, the flags just became pretty colors again and I lost track of the rules.
Using filters with flags for survival
So filters are where the flag system becomes extremely powerful. A filter is just a saved search that Todoist lets you run whenever you need to focus on something specific. The filter that changed things for me was this: `p1 & overdue`. That shows only the scariest red flagged overdue items across everything. When I look at that, there is no hiding behind writing long planning lists or tinkering with automation tools. It is pure survival mode.
I set up another filter like `p1 | p2 & today` which catches both red and orange tasks due today. This feels like a realistic “should get through most of these” view. The coolest part is you can name filters with emojis or simple labels, so I actually named my red one “🔥Deadline View🔥” just to scare myself a little. It has saved me multiple times when I had client calls five minutes away. 😛
Connecting flags with calendar workflows
I do not rely only on Todoist for scheduling. I also push tasks into Google Calendar whenever they need actual time blocks. The flags here act like a prefilter. Instead of pushing hundreds of tasks blindly to my calendar (which looks like a chaotic rainbow barf), I only sync the red and some orange tasks. I use a Zap for this, obviously, but it breaks every few weeks without warning so sometimes the syncing silently fails. That is why the flag upfront matters — I can at least manually drag the flagged ones to my calendar if I notice the Zap died overnight.
One small bug I ran into recently is that when tasks get rescheduled in Todoist, the flag remains, but sometimes Google Calendar still shows the old due date if the Zap does not update. I got burned by that once, thinking a task was done because my calendar looked clear, but Todoist still had it tagged and red. Now I double-check by running a quick filter in Todoist before trusting my calendar feed.
Experimenting with zapier and flags together
Since half my work life is setting up automations that randomly collapse, I tried wiring priority flags into different Zaps. For example, one attempt was to fire a Slack DM to myself whenever a red flagged task appeared in Todoist. It worked, but the first time I ran it, the trigger kept firing for every red task in the project all at once. So instead of one DM, I got twenty messages shouting urgent something something. I had to tweak the Zap to only trigger on new tasks with flags, not existing ones.
Another experiment was labeling flagged tasks differently inside Notion. Using Zapier I made it so if I add a red flag, the same task also shows up in Notion with a label “do first.” That one is still running fine, probably because I was cautious about testing with just two dummy tasks. The risk you run is syncing your entire inbox of hundreds of tasks and then neither service is responsive anymore.
Why sometimes I ignore my own flags
The funniest part is after building all these workflows, I still sometimes end up ignoring the very red items I carefully set. I had flagged “finish tax forms” red, but then spent two hours tweaking the color scheme of my Notion database because it felt more urgent in the moment. This is the human side of task management — you can design perfect systems, but shiny distractions win too often.
What helps is treating flags not like orders, but like traffic lights. Red means you probably should not skip it because the road is closed ahead. But you still might walk around the barrier if you are stubborn enough. That flexibility keeps the system from feeling like a guilt trap.
Small fixes when flags stop working visually
Every once in a while, the Todoist app just does not show flag colors properly, especially on mobile where caching seems aggressive. A gray task will suddenly show as red until you refresh, or a flagged red task might appear unflagged until you reopen the app. When this happens, my quick fix is pretty dumb but always reliable — toggle airplane mode, reopen Todoist, then turn the network back on. It forces a sync, and usually all flags display correctly again.
Desktop weirdness is rarer, but once after a Todoist update all my flags looked like they were gone. I panicked for ten minutes until I realized the priority flag column had been hidden in list view. All I had to do was resize the window slightly and the colors reappeared. I felt ridiculous but relieved at the same time 🙂