In Outlook, open the email you wish to turn into a task. In the top right corner of the email view, click the three dots icon. Scroll down to the Todoist icon. Click Add to Todoist. Todoist is the app that much of the team here at CIG uses. It has a fairly minimalist.

1. Todoist Outlook App
2. Todoist For Outlook Not Working
3. Download Todoist For Outlook
4. Todoist For Outlook Mac Download

In recent weeks I’ve made a shift in my Productivity Path. While I still love what The Omni Group is doing with OmniFocus, I am using another application for my task management these days.

Actually, I’m using two.

For the past six weeks, I’ve been using Asana for my larger team-oriented tasks and projects and Todoist for my individual and smaller team task management.

Why the switch, specifically from OmniFocus to Todoist? There are several reasons behind the move:

1. Ubiquity

Ultimately, most people want a task management solution that they can use anytime, anywhere. Unfortunately OmniFocus doesn’t provide that unless you are using iOS or Mac devices. But the fact of the matter is more people are using Android these days, and the only real solution that Android users have to get their stuff to OmniFocus are third party apps like Send-2-OmniFocus and OmniFocus Mailer. They can’t actually work with OmniFocus on the go, unless they’re also carrying an iPad or even a Mac notebook with them. That limits the accessibility of the app, and that is less than ideal.

Todoist, on the other hand, has a slew of platforms it is developed for:

• Android
• Chrome
• Windows
• iOS
• Mac

Todoist even integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and Postbox. No matter what device you’re using, you can access Todoist (as long as you are able to connect with the Internet upon launch). With integration for three major email clients, you have the ability to have your task manager at the ready while processing your email inbox. Very nice. And with the Todoist chrome extension, you can access your Todoist setup on any site.

Now that’s ubiquity.

2. Pricing

Longtime readers know that I don’t have a problem paying for products and services. I’ve dropped lots of cash on different applications that I’ve abandoned long ago. But I know that I am in the minority when it comes to paying for applications that many consider to be simply a “to do list” and nothing more. There are hundreds of free applications like this out there, but you get what you pay for in many cases.

I’d suggest that Todoist strikes a nice balance in this space, offering a limited free version that will work for many people, and a more robust premium version that scales up exceptionally well.

The free version of Todoist will suffice for people who are looking to add a task management component to their digital workflow for the first time, or for those who don’t need a lot of bells and whistles and yet still want a pleasing user experience. Todoist Premium is only $29 per year and you get a lot for your money. If you’ve been using a task management solution for a while and need to be able to customize things to better suit your approach to productivity, then you’ll definitely want to “go premium” with Todoist.

Todoist Premium offers a ton of features (productivity tracking, enhanced label system, project templates, file attachments, etc.) for what amounts to less than $2.50 per month. That kind of pricing is a lot easier to swallow than what other applications cost – OmniFocus included.

3. Flexibility

There are a few areas where I find Todoist’s flexibility to be another major selling point.

For one, Todoist also offers something that OmniFocus doesn’t: team task management. For the purposes of my virtual assistant experiment, I know I can create a project in Todoist and share items in there with my VA. I can’t do that with OmniFocus.

Now I know I can do this with Asana as well, but I actually prefer the ability to keep my own stuff separate from larger team stuff…and Asana is where I keep my larger team stuff. So I have a project that I use for things I work with my VA and as things come in I can actually drag them to that project from other projects that I’m not sharing. This process will help me offload some tasks I’ve got in my Inbox to my VA seamlessly. (Note: I’ll be sharing how I use Todoist with my virtual assistant more extensively in a future blog post.)

Todoist’s labelling is also helpful, in that I can decide whether I want to use “labels” as contexts or not. I can actually use them in a number of ways, and because I can apply multiple labels to a task I can really hone in on what I want to do at any given time.

I can also flag tasks with “priority levels,” allowing me to mark off my Three Big Rocks for the next day if I want. Todoist allows users to mesh their own approaches to productivity with well-known methodologies like GTD, The Agile Way, and even Kanban to a certain degree (largely through the use of colour). It’s incredibly flexible and versatile…which is what I need in a task management application.

Roadblocks Along The Way

Todoist Outlook App

There are a few things that I’m going to have to trudge through as I get used to using Todoist:

1. No direct path from Drafts. Here’s hoping they get some URL schemes happening here. In the meantime, I simply email tasks to my Inbox and then process from there.
2. No direct path from Dispatch. See above.
3. No Weekly Review function…sort of. Todoist has Todoist Karma, which allows you to track your productivity, but I do miss the reviewing capabilities of OmniFocus (specifically on the iPad). I hope Todoist looks at adding this functionality in the future.

The more time I spend in Todoist, the more comfortable I’m getting. I’ll be writing more about my experience with it as the weeks and months progress.

I’ll still be keeping my eyes on what other options are out there, including OmniFocus, because that is part of my job. But Android is on the rise (again, OmniFocus is Mac and iOS only) and I want to help people get comfortable using task management solutions. The pricing of something like OmniFocus can be a deal-breaker for those who don’t even think they need a tool like it in the first place. I’ll still be writing about OmniFocus from time to time, but there are a lot of great folks out there who write abut it regularly and focus specifically on it. Sven Fechner of SimplicityBliss, Tim Stringer of Technically Simple and Learn OmniFocus, Shawn Blanc, David Sparks, Kourosh Dini (who wrote the great Creating Flow with OmniFocus), and Asian Efficiency (who offer OmniFocus Premium Posts to help you get the most out of the app in its various iterations).

I can say unequivocally that I’m a Todoist user now. I like what they’ve put together and I like where they’re headed. Asana is great for larger teams and I’ll continue to use it (and recommend it) for that purpose, but Todoist is now my personal task management application of choice.

Thoughts on Todoist? Have another task management application of choice? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Todoist is a great multi-platform task manager, and it provides facilities to integrate with many other tools including e-mail apps. Email integration is typically via forwarding your e-email to a todoist inbox email. This, however, sends the actual content of the email to Todoist, which might not be desirable all the time. In this post, we integrate Outlook with Todoist (or any other tool, actually) by creating links back to Outlook e-mails.

I use Outlook for my work email, and Todoist for managing my tasks. However, every time an email results in creating a task in Todoist, I struggle finding a way to refer back to the original email. I want to do this for many reasons. Sometimes the details of the task is defined in the email, sometimes I have reference documents attached to the email, or I just need to reply back to the email when I am done with the task. Sending emails directly to Todoist is not an option for me, as my workplace policies doesn’t allow that. So, what do I do now?

After some googling around, I noticed that it is possible to interact with Outlook using Mac Automation Scripting. What I want to have is some capability to copy link to an outlook message and use it in Todoist. So, I decided to give it a go…

Before we dive into the scripting details, let’s clarify what I am trying to achieve here. I would like to be able to copy links to selected Outlook emails to clipboard, and then paste them to Todoist or any other app. The links will be something in the form of outlook://<message id>. And I want to be able to click on the links and jump back to the Outlook message.

Let’s move to the scripting details…

Mac Automation Scripting

First, we need to gather some basic understanding of how this scripting mechanism works. Mac Automation Scripting allows interacting with applications to automate tasks. AppleScript is the language that Apple provides for this purpose, but it is also possible to use JavaScript for automation as well. The built-in Script Editor application provides a very basic IDE for editing scripts. There is built-in documentation on the available libraries via File > Open Dictionay... menu on Script Editor application.

First script: Getting selected Outlook messages

Now that we have some understanding of how Automation scripting works, it is time to get our hands dirty. Let’s first try to get some information on a selected message in Outlook.

The above script shows the subject of the selected message as a notification. You can copy and try this script in Script Editor. You can also try this with ob-applescript.el if you live in Org Mode.

As I said before, you can actually use JavaScript instead of AppleScript if you don’t feel like learning the quite uncommon syntax of AppleScript. So, here is the same functionality as above in JavaScript for comparison.

JavaScript version is more verbose, especially because it needs two additional lines to access the Standard Additions library, which provides various functions including one for displaying a notification. I would probably still use JavaScript instead of AppleScript for anything somewhat complicated, since I feel better with the more familiar syntax.

Copying the link to selected message with a shortcut

Now that we know how to get selected messages, we need to create a link to that message.

As you can see above, in addition to just creating a URI for the selected message, we now have some error handling and user interaction built into the script to make it more user-friendly.

To try the script, just run in it Script Editor as usual. When you select a message in Outlook and then run the script, it will copy the URI to the system clipboard ready to paste into Todoist (or wherever else you might want to).

Opening outlook links: a custom protocol handler

Now that we are able to copy links to outlook messages, we need a way to handle those links to go back to the Outlook message. The way to do this, is to develop a custom protocol handler. This way our newly introduced outlook://<message id> urls will be recognized by macOS.

In order to implement a custom protocol handler with AppleScript, we simply implement an open location handler as follows.

Then we need to turn this into an app package and edit its Info.plist to define our new URL scheme. Basically we need to go through the following steps:

1. Save the script as an app package in Script Editor. (Save... > Format: Application)

2. Open Finder and locate the saved file. Right click and select Show Package Contents.

3. Under the Contents folder, open Info.plist with your favorite text editor, and add the following content before the last two lines.

4. Save the file. Go back to your app and double click to execute it.

Now we are basically done. If you want to see it working, copy an Outlook message link and paste it to Todoist. Then, you should be able to just click on the link and get back to your e-mail in Outlook. You can use this link in many other places, including the command line (just run open <your outlook link>).

Putting it all together

At this point, we have script that can copy links to Outlook to clipboard, so that we can paste the link to another application. And we can also click on that link (in most apps, including Todoist) to get back to Outlook. We are almost done, but not quite yet. Copying the links is very tedious…

We need to go to Outlook to select a message, and then open our script in Script Editor and run it to copy links to clipboard. This process is not efficient at all. Let’s see what we can do to make this more streamlined.

We have a few options here. One option is to use Automator app to define a service with our script, and then add a keyboard shortcut to our new service. For me this didn’t work reliably unfortunately.

Another option is enabling system-wide script menu. Just go to Script Editor app, and select Script Editor > Preferences menu, and enable Show Script menu in menu bar. This gives you a way to run your scripts by just clicking on the menubar icon for scripts and select your script. In order to make this work, though, we need to save our script to ~/Library/Script folder. After doing this, you can see your script in the menu.

Todoist For Outlook Not Working

If you are like me, and still think that a keyboard shortcut would do better. You can use a more powerful script launcher like Fast Scripts.

Download Todoist For Outlook

Now we have a neat and basic way to integrate Outlook with Todoist, or actually we have a way to link to Outlook messages, and this can be used to integrate Outlook with other applications.

Todoist For Outlook Mac Download

I uploaded the script and ready to use macOS application to github. If you don’t want to replicate the process you can get the app and script from this link.