Working with tasks

A task in Todowl starts as a single line of text and only grows if you need it to. There are no required fields, so capture never gets in the way of thinking.

Add a task

Type in the input at the top of any list and press Enter. The task lands in whichever project and list you are currently looking at, with today’s date if you are on the Today screen and no date otherwise.

On a project screen you can also add a task straight into a specific list, and on the kanban board you add one at the foot of a column.

The detail panel

Click a task and it opens in a column on the right. Drag the divider to make that column wider or narrower; the width sticks between sessions.

Inside the panel you can set:

• Title. Editable in place.
• Description. A full editor, not a plain textarea. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, inline code, links, headings, bullet lists, numbered lists, checklists, quotes, dividers and images. Pasted images can be resized, downloaded at their original size, opened full screen or deleted.
• Date. A single day, or a start and end day for something that spans a week.
• Time. A start time and, optionally, an end time.
• Priority. None, low, medium or high. See Task priorities.
• Project and list. Move the task somewhere else without leaving the panel.
• Repeat. See Repeating tasks.

Close the panel with Escape or by clicking outside it.

List view

The list view groups tasks by when they are due, in a fixed order that reads like a day:

1. Overdue
2. Today
3. Tomorrow
4. Next 7 days
5. Later
6. Completed

Tasks with no date sit outside those date buckets and stay visible in their project until you either schedule them or finish them. Within a group you can drag tasks to set your own order.

Kanban view

The kanban view turns each list in the project into a column. Drag a card from one column to another and the task changes list; drag it up or down inside a column and it changes order. The toggle between list and kanban sits at the top of the project.

Columns are the project’s lists, so adding a column means adding a list. On the free plan a project holds up to 3 lists.

Completing a task

Click the checkbox. The task fades out of the open work and drops into Completed, and if you have sounds on you get a short confirmation tone.

Not everything ends by being done. The task menu also offers won’t do, which closes the task the same way as far as every list is concerned, but marks it with a cross rather than a tick. It is the honest option for work that got cancelled, and it keeps your completion counts from quietly lying to you.

Selecting more than one

On the list view you can drag a selection box across several tasks, or hold the modifier key and click them one by one, then act on the whole set at once from the context menu.

Deleting a task

Right click a task, or open its menu, and choose delete. It moves to the trash and stays there for 30 days before it is removed for good, so a misclick is recoverable. Trash and archive covers the rest.