How good is Todoist for localization project managers? In this quick tutorial, I’ll show you how to set up simple projects in Todoist from scratch ✅
Welcome to another episode in this series! Every month we’ll check out a new project management platform and see how viable it is for localization. All online software will be either free or with a free trial so that you can try it on your own.
Andrej Zito
I use Todoist every day to pretty much run my whole life, I cannot imagine getting things done without Todoist. But how can to do is to help you manage your projects. In this video, I’m going to show you a quick tutorial, how you can set up and utilize to do is to track your projects.
Once you sign up for a free account with Todoist, you’re going to start right here in today’s view, and as you can see, you have a few projects already sort of pre created like to do is to help you get started, I’m just going to get rid of them. So we start with a clean slate interface have to do is is very simple to the first thing as you can see on the left side, we even have a category for projects. And that’s what we’re going to do. First we’re going to create the project Edit Project. And I’m going to call this one project a give it a red color. And for this tutorial we’re going to stick to to do is default view. And that is lists, even though to do is recently added boards to come on boards, which I definitely love, we’re going to stick to the lists because the functionality of the boards is not so great. And you’re going to discover soon why it is. So let’s create a list project. And here is our project a project doesn’t have any tasks right now.
So we’re going to add or stock, which I’m going to say it’s pre processing and hit enter and our task has been added to the project. Very simple, pretty straightforward. When you add a task to your project, you have also the option to add scription. In this case, I’m going to say that the pre processing takes n hours. And once I save it, you’re going to see that information appear here on this list right away. In this view, you can see you can do a lot more stuff like set due dates, priority labels, we’re going to get to that in a bit. What we’re going to do next is to create two sections because for this project, I would like to show you how you can route tasks into these sections. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to create two sets of languages because each sort of language has different workflow and does different tasks that are happening or these languages. So if you hover below adding the task, you will see the Add Section option comes up, it’s going to click it and say that we’re going to create a section for German and Japanese. Then I’m going to hover over here and create one more for French and Korean note our sections are created, I’m going to create all the tasks or both of these sections.
Now that all our tasks are edit, I’m going to show you how you can add subtasks in case you want to get granular and for example translation if you want to have individual checkboxes sort of or subtasks for each language because right now if we just complete the translation, it basically means we have completely translations, German and Japanese. But if you receive them on on different days, you definitely want to keep track of each individual language, right, because otherwise you cannot complete the task. So when you open the task, in this case translation here, you’re going to see the option to add subtasks, I’m going to add very simple German and Japanese sub tasks, which basically act as checklists. So now when we go to the main view, you can see that we can see the hierarchy here. So we know that German and Japanese tasks belong to the translation, which then belongs to the German and Japanese section of our project eight very important structure your project and your tasks well so that you understand what it means. And of course, if you don’t want to see this level of detail, you can always collapse task. And here you still have the indicator that translation has two sub tasks in spite of it.
Now let’s imagine that you want to track your progress. So let’s say that German translator has delivered a translation, you just click here. And that’s how you complete a task. And because this is the first task that I created, on this account, I’m getting this nice animation. But don’t worry, you don’t have it all the time. If you complete Japanese, it’s also going to disappear from the list. And here in this indicator, you still see that you have your two subtasks were completed. If you’re still interested to see all the tasks even though they were deleted, all you have to do is go to the View Settings and check this thing completed tasks. Now you can see that the German and Japanese tasks are showing and if for example, I complete the whole translation, it’s still going to appear but it’s going to move to the bottom of the section or German Japanese this is purely up to you and your preference.
The simplicity of a to do list has its advantages because it’s very simple and easy to use and gives you a lot of satisfaction when you check some task off. However, if you want to track more statuses because right now the checkbox only basically tells us is something wasn’t done and once we complete it, it means it was done. But if we need to track more levels of completion or progress of the task, we can utilize introduced labels. So for example, if I open the review task here, you can see the labels and I can add a label and say that for review We send the heads up, I’m going to create a new label and attach it to it. And now we can see it’s here or to task. So that way you have an immediate information about an action that you took or a different task, even though it still looks like it’s incomplete. But you did something you want to play with more, you just have to have two filters and labels are you going to find the new label that we just created. And you can, for example, change the color to I don’t know yellow, and then you can create another label of or that’s burns when we have all the hats up for headsets for review on firm by the reviewers. Okay, if I go back to project a, you can see here the color has changed. And if I open the task, I can change the label, let’s say to have a convert.
Now the last thing that we need to do as project managers is to keep track of when the tasks are starting and when they’re supposed to finish so it doesn’t fall apart. And in case of Todoist. And with lists, the challenge is that you can only set up due dates or your task. So for example, for reprocessing, let’s say we’re starting today, I can only set that the task supposed to finish tomorrow, since it takes only 10 hours. So set a due dates work tomorrow. And you can see here it appears. Now in our list of tasks, I’m going to add the due dates for the remaining tasks. And now they’re edit. Also, as you can see, I have uncompleted translation, because technically it needs to be done by October 13, which still gives us 15 days. Now the final thing that I want to show you is how you can track multiple projects and all the tasks from different projects in one view. So in the meantime, I have created another simple project B which only has small translation, review and delivery and I said their due dates, if you want to see your projects and the tasks in one view, all you have to do is go into the upcoming view a default it’s showing as a Kanban board sort of combined with the agenda, as you can see here, so you can scroll through to other dates. But maybe for simplicity if we’re using the list view or objects may be here, we can also use a list view.
So here you can see that all the tasks are grouped based on their due dates by default. And so here we can already see that tomorrow we have to finish pre processing project A and Translation Project B scroll down can see that we have a review to be finished by next Monday for Project B and scroll down. We have NTP e to be finished for Project A or French and Korean because this is the section that we defined for the project. Now I definitely prefer to have a Gantt chart or one consolidated view of all the projects and all the tasks because it’s very visual. And I like it and in all the tutorials as to what I’m suggesting that you use. But in this case, we don’t have a Gantt chart, because we also don’t have a start date for the task. So we don’t know when they start when they finish and what is the duration we only have the due dates earlier when you think about it as a pm if I know that translation or project a German Japanese is finishing by Friday technically doesn’t mean that I have to do anything for it on every single day. Right most of the time you just hopefully trust the translators that we’re working on that they will deliver by the date. So maybe what is important for us is focusing on the tasks that have to be done today. And we also have the week into what has to be done tomorrow in case we need to remind some people or make some action before the due date.
And that’s it my friends thank you for watching this quick tutorial for Todoist and hopefully it will help you and give you some idea how you can use it to keep track of all your projects. Whether they’re localization or not.
