I get 100 to 300 items in the inbox each week, through recurring mind dumps and efficient quick capture (more on this in another story). As you may already know, dumping stuff into Todoist’s inbox is the easy part. The real struggle is having hundreds of disorganized items in your to-do list, and being unable to act upon them accordingly.

Here I’ll try to explain my solution to this problem. It’s not easy, it’s more of a methodical series of assembly line actions aimed as clearing the inbox in the less time and in the most efficient way possible.

This ‘guide’ is a collage of various how-tos and answers I got from the internet over the last few months, plus some knowledge base of GTD and various productivity hacks.

Requirements

An already established project structure inside of Todoist. I’ll make sure to share my configuration in a future story, but for now just know that it’s subdivided into major areas of my life such as Career, Love and Living Environment.

Having a system in place for collecting reference material (I use Evernote and Google Drive) is also mandatory to organize your Todoist.

Key concepts

Work in batches! This applies to all areas of life, not only this guide. It’s the most valuable advice I can give you, and it saved me tons of hours in the last few years. It’s the foundation of the 'assembly line' whole idea.

For example, while washing the dishes, do not lose time by cleaning a dish at a time, than washing it and finally dry it and put it into place. Instead, clean all the dishes first and put them into another sink or large container. Then, wash all of them. Finally, dry every item before putting everything into place. Just start a stopwatch and see how much time you save by grouping your tasks this way!

Clearing the inbox: split

The first step is the easiest and the most satisfying one. Simply assign each item in the inbox to a relevant project. Use the shortcut # while editing a task to be as quick as possible with this.

Do not waste time renaming, labeling or scheduling tasks at this time. It will be done in batches, in the next steps. Just move the items out of the Inbox.

There are a few exceptions:

Delete already completed tasks instead of moving them

Delete tasks that repeat themselves, leaving only one instance for each task

If something is not a task but just random mind rubble, delete it

I use my inbox to collect everything: tasks and notes but also articles, pictures and useful links. Before acting on the different types on information I would still move everything to the appropriate project. Yes, even if it’s reference material and not an actual task.

Once your Inbox is empty, feel free to proceed to the next step. I usually do all the steps on the same day, with a rewarding break in between each phase.

Clearing your inbox: meaningful renaming

This is a way to trick your brain too. Applying this step to your Todoist tasks you’ll definitely end up feeling less stressed.

Rename your tasks using a ‘verb: something' structure. For example:

Call: mom

Do: dishes

Text: boss

Draw: character

Write: blog post

This way, you’ll end up with a really actionable list of tasks. Infact, if it’s not an actionable task you have two ways to deal with it:

If it belongs to Todoist, remove the checkbox appending an asterisk (*) to the task name. If needed, rename the task in a meaningful way, and assign a label to filter this kind of tasks out in the future, for example Non-completable .

. If it doesn’t belong to Todoist, label it Out and later move it to the appropriate container (Evernote, Calendar, Pinterest..)

Do not do anything else in this phase. Don’t move out tasks yet, and don’t fidget with other labels until the next step.

You can create a filter to help you fetch all the tasks that are missing the colon: !Search:: & !#Inbox & !recurring & no date & !@Out & !@Non-completable

Once this filter returns no entries, it’ll be time to move to the next step.

Clearing your inbox: adding context

Create a new filter for Search:: & !#Inbox & !recurring & no date & no labels . This will fetch all the tasks that still needs to be refined.

Now it’s time to add some context. This really depends on your kind of system, but basically it means to:

Add a due date to items requiring a deadline

Make repeating tasks recurring, like every X days

Add notes about the task (e.g. feedback from a client or a quick update on the status of the task) as comments

Add a label depending on the type of tasks, more on this in a second

Add sub-tasks to items requiring more than an actions to be completed

My system is not heavily relying on due dates tho. I use due dates only for items really requiring a deadline. I mark items which I still need to act upon with the Next label, and from there I fill my daily to-do list using the Focus label.

My system relies instead on a series of labels, which I later fetch using smart filters. I’ll get to my labels system in a future story, but here are some ideas:

Someday/Maybe for items that don’t or can’t have immediate focus

for items that don’t or can’t have immediate focus Call , Email or Text to later time-box that kind of tasks

, or to later that kind of tasks Waiting for tasks that cannot be complete until an external factor reaches a certain status, for example a colleague delivering a report or a client missing their feedback on a project

Clearing your inbox: move out

This is the last step, but your inbox should already be empty by now.

In this phase, you will simply filter for all the items labeled Out and you’ll move them to their appropriate collection bucket. This too depends on your system, but for me is:

Notes, articles and how-tos go to Evernote

Links go to my bookmarks

Pictures go into my Pinterest

You could also have some additional labels for this, to better take advantage of the assembly line bonuses. For example, you could label all the stuff going into Evernote with the Evernote label and then move everything there in a single session instead of constantly switching between different tabs for all your collections buckets.

The next steps

Now you need to act upon all your freshly organized tasks. For this, I suggest the creation of meaningful filters to fetch similar types of tasks to work on them in bulk. Todoist has a lot of examples, but I’ll make sure to get to mine in a future story as well.

Some examples:

Get all emails, calls and texts into a single filter. This way, you can schedule a time during the day where you can do all of them instead of aimlessly wandering through your to-do list all day and scatter your willpower.

Get similar kinds of work together. Eg, filter for all the stuff needing brainstorming for when you’ll have a boost of creativity and feel ready to kick off your ideas, or all of the writing stuff for when you are calm, focused and free of distractions.

Conclusion

I use Todoist because of its amazing natural language processing which helps me waste the less clicks possible while doing my work. There are tons of productivity and task management software around, my ‘work in batches’ system will work with whatever software you are using — even with bullet journaling — you’ll just need to draw inspiration from it and tweak it to your system.

In the end, it’s just a matter of making the system work for you, not the other way around. It might seem like a lot of effort, but this kind of routine has saved me from losing countless hours and ideas. It might not work for everyone, but as a productivity junkie as I am I can assure you that I tried everything in the last five years to get more stuff done and this worked for me.

It’s a simple routine, which will help you get more organized and feel less stressed at the end of the day.