About this lesson
Avoid snowballing with tasks by using smart schedule.
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Quick reference
Using Smart Schedule
Planning the week ahead can sometimes be tricky, and getting a helping hand can go a long way.
Smart schedule has been available inside of Todoist for the last 2 years and has made many people's lives a lot easier when it comes to planning.
Smart schedule helps you to co-ordinate tasks around your more available dates. Using machine learning, smart schedule will help you to plot tasks using insights into how you current work in Todoist. So, the more you spend on Todoist, the better the recommendation.
Clicking into smart schedule with a task or multiple tasks will allow you to organize them across your account without causing too many issues or clashes with other tasks.
When to use
- Once you've added tasks for the week
- Looking for assistance with re-scheduling or adapting them
Instructions
- Open Todoist
- Select Overdue tasks
- Use multi-select (Ctrl or Command)
- Select "Schedule"
- You can manually schedule to a date
- Use "Smart Schedule"
- Smart schedule will provide suggested dates
- Select or decline the suggested dates
- To decline, hit "Remove task from smart schedule"
- Hit "Update" to update suggested dates
- Task details will be updated and dates changed
To get smart schedule per individual task:
- Head to "Task Actions"
- On the far left a "Suggested Date" will appear
- Click this if you'd like that task to be re-assigned to the new date
Hints & tips
- Avoid snowballing (scheduling the task for the next day) automatically
- 00:04 Hello everyone, and welcome back to this GoSkills course all about Todoist.
- 00:09 Now, in the previous session, we actually talked about
- 00:12 how you can use the Next 7 Day tab over here to view and plan your week ahead.
- 00:17 And of course, that's very important.
- 00:19 Being able to plan ahead and keep yourself organized is very valuable.
- 00:23 But there is actually something that a lot of people suffer from and
- 00:27 that is when tasks become overdue and having a too bloated inbox.
- 00:31 And we talked about this a little bit earlier in the course.
- 00:34 When it comes to practical features inside of Todoist,
- 00:37 it can help you towards organizing your task a week ahead.
- 00:40 We're going to take advantage of them, aren't we?
- 00:42 So as you can see here, we've got two tasks that are overdue.
- 00:46 And you might maybe put them for the next or the next day after,
- 00:49 and maybe not even get round to them, because you're gradually building up.
- 00:54 And this is a effect that's called the Snowball effect.
- 00:57 You keep adding tasks to tomorrow just out of the whim, but
- 01:00 actually, Todoist is aiming to help you fix and solve that problem.
- 01:04 So by selecting both of these tasks, which is really easy to do.
- 01:08 You can select as many tasks as you like.
- 01:10 You can go in this top left-hand corner and hit Schedule.
- 01:13 Now, if you wanted to, you can manually schedule it.
- 01:16 So for example, if I wanted to move both of these until Monday, I easily could.
- 01:20 But you can actually see, up here there's something called Smart Schedule.
- 01:24 And Smart Schedule helps you to manage multiple items.
- 01:27 Now, as you can see, this has appeared and it takes great way to coordinate it.
- 01:32 So what Smart Schedule does is it uses AI to help you schedule the tasks.
- 01:37 What it essentially does is it analyzes your Todoist account and
- 01:41 based on Machine Learning detect when you are available, and
- 01:45 also when you are most productive when you're ticking those tasks off, so
- 01:49 that it puts it in the most suitable slot.
- 01:52 So for example, on this one, it's detected that these two tasks are rather due,
- 01:57 and it's coordinated them to be added in on Monday, seeing a fresh space for
- 02:02 you to do.
- 02:02 So all you have to do is press Update.
- 02:05 If you don't want to add one of these or remove the task from Smart Scheduling, or
- 02:09 actually reschedule it to a certain date you can do, and that's, of course,
- 02:13 manually accessible there.
- 02:15 But if I just click Update and go to the Next 7 Days view.
- 02:18 If I go to Monday,
- 02:19 you can see here the two tasks have been added there at the same time.
- 02:23 And that's based on Todoist AI Learning.
- 02:27 Now, if you wanted to do this only for, for example,
- 02:30 I want to plan on Richard's retirement but it got moved to another day.
- 02:34 I could easily do that, but you can do it per task as well.
- 02:38 Smart Schedule appears in the top left-hand corner on this mini due date
- 02:42 window.
- 02:43 If I hit that it actually reschedules it to a time that is most suitable. It sees
- 02:48 that today is a free day.
- 02:50 And as you can see here, I can coordinate that there.
- 02:53 So this is very helpful if you've got overdue items in your inbox, or
- 02:58 if you want to look and plan ahead using your Today tab or Next 7 Days.
- 03:02 And it's a great way, if you've got tons of tasks to recoordinate them based
- 03:07 on your availability.
- 03:09 So Smart Schedule is available on all accounts, and it's a great feature for
- 03:14 taking advantage of your calendar and managing your tasks.
- 03:19 We're going to talk about Todoist Search next, so let's dive into that one.
- 03:22 Make sure to take advantage of the exercises and
- 03:25 all of the resources provided too.
- 03:27 I'll see you in the next feature.
- 03:28 Cheers.
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