Todo Basic Concepts

Task Lists

ToDo contains two types of task lists: built-in lists and personalized lists.

Built-in Smart Lists

These lists are automatically created and available to you as a way to quickly get to all your tasks in an organized fashion.

Everything

The "All Tasks" list is a gathering place for all of your tasks in one big list. Regardless of what specific list your tasks may be placed in, this is the list where you can see everything.

Focus List

The "Focus List" is designed to help you focus on tasks that are important right now. Most of the time, you'll want to use this list to see what needs to be done. By default, it will show tasks that are overdue and due today.

Tip: You can customize the rules for which types of tasks will appear in your Focus List by changing your app preferences Settings > Focus List.

Important

The Important list helps you quickly see any task that you've marked with a star. If something is very important to you, mark the task with a star and you'll have it at your fingertips easily.

Inbox

The "Inbox" list is where tasks are listed that aren't specifically assigned to one of your personal lists. Many people use this list as a way to hold tasks they created quickly and will later revisit to sort to a personalized list later.

Personalized Smart Lists

ToDo Cloud now features Smart Lists. Smart Lists give you deeper control over how you view, manage, and complete tasks. A Smart List essentially allows you to filter and view your tasks by nearly any set of identified task attributes. ToDo Cloud comes built with pre-defined Smart Lists, but also gives you the ability to create your own.

Personalized Smart Lists allow you to create custom lists based on multiple to-do attributes. For instance:

    Words

You could create a Smart List from all lists except your “Personal” list that have the word “chocolate” in the task name

    Priority

You could create a Smart List from all lists that have the word “Crossfit” in the task name and are either “high” priority or that have been starred

    Date Range

You could create a Smart List from all shared work lists for all tasks that are less than a week overdue that are assigned to you…or to John…or to Jamie

    User Assignment

You could create a Smart List from a select group of lists for all tasks that are marked with low priority and that are assigned to Danny

Personalized Lists

Use personalized lists to create custom "folders" or "buckets" for your tasks to be assigned to. For example, you might have two lists named "Work" and "Home" to keep your tasks separated.

You can customize personal lists with a name, color, and icon to help you visually organize your tasks into different lists.

Tip: If you're a ToDo Pro Premium subscriber, you can invite others to share a personalized list.

Task Types
When you create a task you can choose between three types:

Normal Tasks

The majority of the time, you'll be creating normal tasks, just like you might write down on a piece of paper. When you've got something you need to do, like, "Pick up dry cleaning," you'll normally create a normal task and assign it a due date.

Projects

Create a project when something you need to do can be broken up into other tasks (subtasks). You can assign a due date, start date, priority, etc. to subtasks just like you would a normal task.

Checklists

The easiest way to visualize how checklists can be helpful is to think about a shopping list. You might create a checklist called, "Shopping" and add items to it like bananas, milk, oranges, etc. Items inside of a checklist are meant to be basic and do not have a due date or any other property besides just a name.

Task Features

Due Date

Set a date when your task is due. Due dates are helpful in keeping your task lists organized based on your sorting settings.

Due Time

If your task is due at a specific time, set a due time, like 2:00 PM. You must have already set a due date on your task.

Note: When you set a due time, a reminder alert will automatically be created for you. You can change your default alert preferences in ToDo > Settings > General > Alert Defaults section.

Start Date

Sometimes you want to be reminded to start working on something before it's actually due. This is exactly what start dates are for. For example, suppose you've got a term paper due on Friday, but you know it's going to take you a few days to complete it. Set the start date for Tuesday so it will start showing up at the top of the All and Focus list sooner than it's actually due.

Priority

How important is your task? In addition to a task's due date, priority can be used to help you control the order your tasks appear. Choose None for no priority, or Low, Medium, or High. High priority tasks due the same day will always be listed before medium, low, and none.

Repeat

If you have something that recurs over time, like taking out the trash on Fridays, repeating tasks are the perfect solution for this. ToDo includes an extensive list of options for repeating your tasks, like repeating every week, quarterly, on specific days, and even on days like the 5th Sunday of every month.

When you mark a repeating task completed, ToDo looks at your repeating rules and schedules a new task for you automatically.

You've got two options for how tasks will repeat. You can choose to repeat from the task's original Due Date or repeat from the Completion Date.

Reminder Alert

Need an extra reminder to get something done? Add a reminder alert to your task to go off at a specific time. When you specify a Due Time (as mentioned above), ToDo can automatically schedule an alert for you (this is how the app works by default) so you won't forget your task.

ToDo lets you add more than just one reminder alert. Feel free to add as many as you need to help you get stuff done.

List

When you're working on a task and want to re-assign it to a different list use the List property. For example, you may decide that a particular task makes better sense in your "Work" list.

Tags

Tags are becoming a very familiar way of marking documents, web sites, blog posts, etc. that help you quickly search or filter items down in the future. You can add one or more tags to a task and use it later on to filter tasks by tags.

Tip: When filtering by tag, you can select multiple tags. If you want tasks to appear that include all of the tags you select, set your Tags Filter preference to And. If you want tasks to appear that include at least one of the tags you select, set your Tags Filter preference to Or.

Note

A task's note is a convenient place to keep information handy that will help you accomplish the task. Use the note to add in extra details. The note feature is not meant to be a full-on word processor where you can stuff an endless amount of text, but it will handle most scenarios pretty well.

Tip: If you're a ToDo Cloud Premium subscriber and send/forward an email to your Task Creation Email, the body of your email will be added to the task's note.

Comments

Note: This feature is only available for ToDo Cloud Premium subscribers.

When you're working with others in a shared list, start or join a conversation about a task by adding a comment. Comments help keep all the relevant information from your team in one spot, all focused around the task at hand.

Tip: To get the most out of comments, make sure you've enabled email notifications for the shared list the task is in. When someone adds a new comment, you'll get an email with the comment included. You can even reply to the email to keep the conversation going and your email reply will automatically be added as a new comment.

Assignment

Note: This feature is only available for ToDo Cloud Premium subscribers.

Task assignment is useful when you want to assign a task to yourself or someone else in a shared task list. When you've got a number of tasks assigned to others, you can use the member filter to filter tasks by specific people. Also note that when a task is assigned to someone, only they will receive the reminder alert.

Location Alert (Geotagging)

Use location alerts to help remind you of something when you leave or arrive at a specific location. For example, you might add a location alert to remind you to turn your sprinkler system off when you arrive home. When you get home, your iOS device will let ToDo know you've arrived and ToDo will display an alert.