The Controversial Truth: Is Todoist Making You Less Productive?

Outcome first: by the time you finish this article you’ll be able to tell if Todoist (or any powerful task app) is helping you or secretly making you less productive - and you’ll have a clear, concrete plan to fix it if it’s the latter.

Why this matters. You probably downloaded Todoist to reduce stress, stop forgetting things, and do more of the right work. Instead, many people end up spending more time organizing their tasks than doing the actual work. That feeling - that your tool is now a second job - is not imaginary.

The promise and the danger

Task managers like Todoist promise externalized memory, structured planning, and reliable reminders. When used well, they do those things beautifully.

But there are real, research-backed reasons a good tool can make you worse off when misused:

Choice overload and feature bloat lead to analysis paralysis (Paradox of Choice).
Spending time organizing tasks creates maintenance overhead that steals energy from execution - the tool becomes work.
Too much granularity fragments attention and increases context switching, lowering effective throughput.
Constant task grooming can produce decision fatigue and procrastination (Decision fatigue).

These aren’t hypothetical. The same dynamics appear in broader studies about planning, prediction, and the productivity paradox (Planning fallacy, Productivity paradox).

How Todoist (or any task manager) can make you less productive - specific mechanisms

Over-organization - creating dozens of projects, labels, and nested tasks that you never finish. The list becomes a museum of intentions.
Task fragmentation - breaking everything into tiny, 10–20 subtasks so you spend more time managing the list than completing meaningful work.
Maintenance drain - frequent re-scheduling, re-labeling and prioritizing becomes recurring busywork.
False sense of progress - completing trivial checklist items feels productive but doesn’t move big goals forward.
Inbox paralysis - a swelling “inbox” of uncategorized tasks that you never process.
Notifications and reminders that encourage shallow work and interrupt deep focus.

If any of those sound familiar, your tool is starting to run you.

Quick checklist: Are you being harmed by your task app?

You’re probably suffering if you answer “yes” to several of these:

You spend more than 5–10 minutes daily maintaining the task list.
You have more than 100 active tasks or dozens of projects you rarely open.
Your task list contains many items you don’t plan to do in the next 2–4 weeks.
You find yourself reorganizing rather than starting - often.
You feel anxious looking at your list.

If this is you, you don’t need a new tool. You need constraints.

The right idea (and the right constraints)

Tools are neutral. The productivity comes from a system of constraints and habits you build around the tool. Here are the principles to apply:

Reduce decision points. Limit how many choices you make each day.
Use friction intentionally - fewer projects, fewer labels, fewer notifications.
Reserve the task app for commitments you can’t keep in short-term memory or on your calendar.
Put time-bound tasks on the calendar; keep Todoist for next actions and reminders.
Prefer doing to organizing. If a task takes <2 minutes, do it now (the two-minute rule).

These map to classic ideas from systems like Getting Things Done (GTD) and also borrow from cognitive science ideas of external cognition and distributed memory (Distributed cognition).

A minimal Todoist setup that actually helps

Goal: reduce maintenance, increase execution.

Minimum recommended structure:

Projects - use for outcomes or areas (limit to 6–12 active projects).
Labels - optional - use at most 3 (e.g., @waiting, @quick, @phone).
Filters - 2–4 useful ones (Today, Next 7 Days, Focus).
Inbox - capture-only. Empty it in a quick daily sweep.
Due dates - for things that must happen on a date.
Calendar - put real time commitments on your calendar - not in the task list.

Example filters (Todoist syntax):

Today: today
Focus: @quick & (today | overdue)
Next 7 Days: 7 days

A practical daily routine:

Morning 5-minute sweep - triage inbox into Do Now / Schedule / Someday / Delegate.
Pick 1–3 MITs (Most Important Tasks) for the day - put them at the top of Today.
Work in time blocks (90–120 minutes) with no list-checking allowed during a block.
Quick end-of-day review - complete the inbox sweep and mark 3 wins.

Weekly routine (15–30 minutes):

Review active projects (close or archive projects that no longer matter).
Cull the list - archive or delete tasks >4 weeks out that you never scheduled.
Update project next actions so the Today and Focus filters are useful.

Two configurations: Minimalist and Moderate

Minimalist (for people overwhelmed):

Projects - 6 areas (Work, Personal, Health, Finance, Errands, Learning).
Labels - none or @waiting.
Filters - Today, Next 7 Days.
Use due dates sparingly.

Moderate (for power users who still want simplicity):

Projects - up to 12 active projects.
Labels - @waiting, @context (phone, home), @energy (high, low).
Smart filters for MITs and Waiting.
Automations - use recurring tasks and templates to avoid repetitive organization.

Practical guardrails to stop over-organization

Limit your active projects. If you can’t say the mission of a project in one sentence, archive it.
Stop breaking tasks into micro-subtasks unless the micro-steps truly help you start.
Turn reminders into calendar events when they require a time commitment.
Disable non-essential notifications.
Batch maintenance - do list grooming in a single 15–30 minute weekly slot, not continuously.

How to measure whether Todoist is helping or hurting

Pick 3 metrics and test for 2–4 weeks before and after changing your setup. Suggestions:

Completed meaningful tasks per week (tasks that move high-impact projects forward).
Time spent maintaining the list (aim <30 minutes/week for maintenance).
Subjective stress or mental load score (1–10) at week’s end.

If your “meaningful tasks” count rises and maintenance/time drops, you’ve won.

When you should consider ditching the app (or switching tools)

Consider moving off Todoist if:

Even after simplifying, the system consistently consumes more time than it saves.
You find yourself performing ‘organizational busywork’ for status rather than value.
Your personality works better with simpler artifacts - a paper notebook, a calendar-first approach, or a single daily checklist.

But don’t confuse a change of tool with a change in habit. Often a simpler configuration of the same app fixes the problem.

Final quick fixes you can apply today

Archive projects you haven’t touched in 3 months.
Set a constraint - maximum 10 active tasks in Today.
Turn anything <2 minutes into an immediate action.
Disable all non-essential push notifications.
Schedule one weekly 20-minute grooming session and treat it like an appointment.

Closing thought - the controversial truth

Apps like Todoist are powerful because they let you externalize memory, plan, and automate. But power without constraints becomes work. If you’re building a tiny bureaucracy inside your task manager, the tool is not helping - it’s adding cognitive load and stealing your execution time.

The real productivity hack is not the perfect app. It’s the discipline to say “enough structure” and the courage to limit your options. When you strip away the unnecessary organization, the tool can finally do what it promised: get the distractions out of your head so you can do the work. If Todoist is making you less productive, it’s not the app’s fault alone - it’s the system you built around it. Make that system smaller, and your productivity will grow.

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