How to Use Todoist for High School

In this video, I'll show you how I helped my kids organize their high school work using Todoist.

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Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I helped my kids organize their high school work using Todoist.

I'm a bit of an organizational system junkie, but obviously not everyone is. I've been trying to find a system that works well for organizing tasks for each of my kids and they both have really different styles. I started out using Trello with both of my kids -- you can see my video on that. My son almost immediately found it too complicated and confusing to use. Fair enough. He really just wanted to use one of those super oversimplified homework apps, but after trying a couple out, I thought they were way too limited. So, he's now using Todoist to manage school work, chores, and his college application process.Because we were looking for a simple system, this use of Todoist is fairly straightforward. Simple is important though -- the more complicated you make things, the less inclined you are to maintain your system, and the more likely you are to stop using it altogether. My hope is that this system will be simple and effective enough for my son to take to college as a way for him to organize his life beyond high school. Fingers crossed. I haven't done a full tutorial video on Todoist yet, but in it's most basic form, you add tasks to Todoist with or without due dates, recurrences, and priority levels. If you upgrade to the premium version, you can also add labels and notes. So, let me cover the five kinds of tasks that go into Todoist for my son and how he handles them:
* School work - I have a whole rant about how difficult high school organization is which I went into on my Trello video, but I will spare you here. Suffice it to say, high schoolers have a lot coming at them with assignments coming in willy nilly from teachers with very little advance notice. If your school is set up more like a college in that teachers are required to plan out their courses months in advance, you may want to view my video on using Todoist for College. I'm going to assume for the purposes of this video that you may know about SOME long-term projects or papers for a class, but that most of your assignments will be coming at you on a weekly or daily basis. The first thing you want to do in Todoist is set up a big overall project called School. Then under this project, you want to make sub-projects for each class you are taking that will give assignments. No need to create a project for your personal fitness class if they never give homework. You can create new projects by hitting the three dots to the right and choosing to add a project below. Give each class it's own color and spice it up with an emoji if you want from your phone keyboard. Then make sure that it is a sub-project under School by indenting it with this movement handle to the left. Once you have all of your classes set up as sub-projects, you can start tagging assignments as you enter them. So, during the day, you go from class to class entering in all of the things that you need to do: homework for trig, a worksheet for Geosystems, study vocab for English, and reading and a vocab sheet for AP Gov. Okay, you can capture these on the fly without assigning them to a project and they will just end up in your inbox. Then later you can assign them to projects and give them due dates. A quick note about due dates. You may be tempted to put in the actual due date for you assignment. This worksheet is due on 11/7. Unfortunately, if you do that, it won’t show up in your Today list until the ACTUAL DAY IT IS DUE. That doesn’t give you much time to work on it, does it? Instead, i always put in the date of when i need to work on something. So, if the worksheet is due on the 7th, i would put this assignment on the 6th or earlier. Now you can go to the Today view to see all the things you need to work on today. Then you can drag and drop them into the order that you want to work on them, checking them off as you complete them. In addition, you can choose to view all of your assignments for a specific class and what may be coming up by looking at the project view. Okay -- in addition to daily assignments you may also have some . . .

[theta-collector]

Thanks for the tips! My oldest daughter just started high school and has been inundated with assignments. I’ve been using Todoist for myself for years and was pleased to find your video about how to setup Todoist for a High Schooler. Great tips!

[harshgalba]

Lovely tutorial, I'm studying in grade 11 and I really needed an app to help manage my time . This video was the first thing I watched after downloading Todolist . Helped me a lot :)

[doctormelva]

Thank you, very helpful and succinct with specific, relatable examples.

[kloverend]

I have ADHD and have never been able to use systems effectively. I often switch between MANY systems. Currently, I use Trello for planning homeschool for my 8th grader and Trello for work. I watched both of your videos and ToDoist seems much more manageable for when my 8th grader heads off to High School. Thanks!!

[jennifergrasse]

So helpful!!! Great videos - thank you!!!

[Alrobye]

amazing video, thank you for the helpful information. a simple note, you should fix the exposure of the camera it's over exposed if you don't know how to do it I can help you

[RafikHariri]

Just started with Todoist but I really don’t like their new widget on iOS 14 cause it only shows the things for today. Thanks for the awesome video 👏👏

[lovealwaysjasmine]

Is this better for chore list as well versus AnyList?