Why normal filters never feel enough
So the default Todoist filters look nice on paper, but I swear every time I actually try to use them, I just end up with a messy screen that still includes tasks I don’t care about right now. The built in Today view shows every single thing due today, which for me means grocery reminders, random test tasks I forgot to archive, and follow ups that are technically due but not at all urgent. It’s like having ten sticky notes scattered across your fridge, and half of them are jokes you wrote to yourself three weeks ago that never got erased. It makes my brain lock up completely.
What I needed was a filter that only showed me the tasks I actually marked as Important. Todoist has a priority system with colored flags, but the default Today page ignores whether something is flagged red or not. So one of my tricks was to use a filter phrase like “today & p1”. That’s Todoist’s syntax for “only things due today with priority 1.” It looks simple, but the first time I tried it, I forgot the “&” symbol and just typed “today p1” and nothing came back. The screen literally looked empty, so for a moment I thought I had deleted everything. 😅
When the filter works, it’s satisfying because your list drops from maybe a dozen cluttered items down to the three or four that are actually looming over you. Just be warned that if you do not actually assign the red flag priority to a task, it will never show here, so this requires discipline more than clever syntax.
Learning how Todoist priorities really behave
Todoist makes you think priority levels are obvious, but they have this underlying quirk. Priority 1 is red, Priority 2 is orange, Priority 3 is blue, and Priority 4 is just no color. At first, I thought tasks automatically sorted themselves by urgency, but that does not happen unless you specifically sort by priority inside a custom filter. In the standard Today view, you might see a low priority task listed before a red flagged one, which makes the whole system feel unreliable.
Here’s what finally clicked for me. The easiest way is to combine the Today keyword with a specific priority. For example:
– Filter phrase: today & p1 → shows urgent, red flagged tasks due today
– Filter phrase: today & p2 → shows less urgent but still important tasks due today
– Filter phrase: today & p1 | today & p2 → pulls both levels into one combined view
The bar character (|) acts like an “or” statement. I discovered this after five minutes of yelling at my screen when it refused to display both at the same time. No shame in admitting I had to Google “Todoist filter or syntax” more than once 😛
But here’s the catch no one tells you: if you have a task overdue that is marked p1, it will also show up in “today & p1”. That was confusing the first time I saw a red flagged overdue item for yesterday sneak into my today view. The logical answer is to use “today & p1” instead of “overdue | today & p1”. Subtle but important.
Creating custom filters step by step
The part that gets beginners most tripped up is actually creating the filter, because it’s buried under menus. In Todoist, click on Filters and Labels in the side panel. Then create a new filter, type your filter query (like today & p1), and give it a name. The best naming move I made was calling mine “Today Urgent” instead of the boring “Filter 01” default name.
Once you save it, it appears in the sidebar along with projects and labels. Clicking on it shows only those tasks in real time. That means you can star it or pin the filter at the top for easy access.
For a beginner, think of a filter as like wearing special glasses that only let you see specific sticky notes on your wall. The sticky notes are still there in the background, but the glasses hide 80 percent of them so your brain doesn’t melt down. Without the filter, everything piles up and you stop trusting the system. With the filter, you actually feel like Todoist understands what matters.
The broken behavior that confused me
Okay, small rant here. One morning I clicked on my custom Today Urgent filter expecting just three red flagged tasks, but instead Todoist showed me five. Two of them were tied to deadlines late in the week, but for some unknown reason they appeared in my Today view inside the filter. It looked like Todoist was ignoring the “today” keyword completely.
After digging around way too much, I found out that if you create a recurring task and then change its due date inside the repeating cycle, sometimes it will bug out and think the new due date starts today, even if it doesn’t. So my recurring “trash pickup” task that should have been Friday was suddenly haunting Tuesday. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The quick fix was to open the task and manually reset its due date. But the bigger lesson for me was that filters are only as solid as the underlying data. If your dates are messy, your filter will look messy too.
Combining labels with priorities for focus
So far I’ve talked about using priority flags, but honestly, labels are the real superhero here. I created a label called @critical, and whenever I have a task that absolutely must happen today or something breaks, I slap that on. You can mix this with the filter logic too:
“today & @critical”
Now instead of relying on the red flag (which I sometimes forget to set), I just label critical things and then pull that filter whenever I’m in pure panic mode. Combine that with “today & @critical & p1” and you can get an ultra focused view. This came in handy when I had tech tasks competing with errands. Like, I don’t need to see grocery notes getting the same visual weight as fixing an automation that broke in Zapier.
If labels feel overwhelming, just start with one or two. Even a single @important label can change how effective your filters feel compared to the default views.
Arranging filters in side menu for speed
One thing no one mentions is that your sidebar can turn into a chaotic jungle if you have too many filters and projects. I had about ten filters at one point, and scrolling down every time I wanted to toggle Today Urgent was ridiculous. Turns out you can drag filters higher so they sit right under the Inbox and Today tabs. That one small tweak cut the number of clicks in half.
If you like color, Todoist lets you assign icons to filters too, though they’re hidden under the tiny menu. I gave my Today Urgent filter a little red tag icon, so even when I’m half asleep in the morning, it jumps out.
A glimpse at alternative apps versus Todoist
I flirted briefly with other task apps like TickTick and Microsoft To Do because I was getting annoyed at that recurring bug. TickTick actually has a similar system for priorities, but the filters are not as deep; they feel more like saved searches than actual logical building blocks. Microsoft To Do, on the other hand, has a big My Day button that feels nice at first but doesn’t let you filter by urgency at all. That was a deal breaker for me since every day ended up looking like the same wall of tasks.
Todoist’s advantage is that its syntax language, once you learn it, gives you more power. Sure, you might break your brain trying to remember whether you need an “&” or a “|”, but at least you can build exactly the view you want. If you are curious about the broader Todoist features, their main site at todoist.com explains them decently.
When everything stops working again
The real story here is that some mornings my carefully built Today Urgent filter just suddenly feels wrong. Like I’ll click it and swear I am missing a task I know for sure I set last night. I’ll dig through my Inbox, see that it was marked correctly with p1, and yet it doesn’t display in the filter. Sometimes all it takes is refreshing the browser or forcing the mobile sync to kick in. Other times, I basically have to toggle the due date forward one day and then back again until the task finally appears.
It feels like wizardry. And yet once it pops back into view, I can finally exhale because the list is exactly what I need, not a flood of distractions. At least until next Tuesday when it mysteriously breaks again 🙂