Tips & Tricks

Work smarter with time estimates

Estimates are the secret weapon of Tasks. Once you get into the habit of adding a quick estimate to every task, you'll know at a glance whether your day is realistic or overloaded.

Pick the nearest preset — it's better to have a rough estimate than none at all. 30 min for something that might take 45 min is perfectly fine.
Use the All Tasks → No Estimation filter weekly to find tasks that have drifted without a time estimate. Sorting those out takes two minutes and makes your planning much sharper.
When a task feels enormous and hard to estimate, that's a signal: break it into smaller pieces, each of which gets its own estimate.

Use deadline presets, not exact dates

The four presets — Today, This Week, Next Week, This Month — cover 95 % of real planning needs without the friction of picking a specific date. The system automatically puts each task in the right time-filtered view, so the task shows up exactly where you'd expect it.

If a deadline passes and the task isn't done, it's automatically flagged as overdue. This means you never have to mentally track what's late — the app does it for you.

Pick the right view for the right moment

| Situation | Best view | |-----------|----------| | Morning planning | Today or This Week | | Mid-sprint overview | Kanban with the current week as the date range | | Clearing your backlog | Active (search + scroll through everything not done) | | Finding unplanned tasks | Quick Tasks (tasks with no deadline) | | Auditing your planning quality | All Tasks with the No Deadline or No Estimation filter |

Master the Kanban date-range filter

The Kanban board defaults to today → 7 days ahead, which is great for week planning. But you can slide the range:

Set it to the full current month for a monthly retrospective.
Set it to a two-day window the night before a busy day to see only what's immediately in front of you.
The maximum range is 31 days — ideal for sprint planning.

The filter only affects which cards are displayed; drag-and-drop status updates always save regardless of the filter.

Model your recurring routines

If you find yourself creating the same set of tasks more than once, that's a model waiting to happen. Good candidates:

Weekly review — process inbox, review goals, plan next week
Deployment checklist — build, test, migrate, deploy, verify
Meeting prep — agenda, notes template, follow-up tasks
House move — packing, address changes, utility setup

Once the model exists, spinning up a new collection from it takes one click. Combine it with a TTL so the collection self-destructs when it's no longer needed.

Choose the right collection view type

Classic — use when tasks have no natural "done pile", e.g. an active backlog you revisit constantly.
Hide Now — use for project checklists where you want a clean, distraction-free focus on remaining work. Completed tasks are tucked into the Archive tab out of sight.
Hide Tomorrow — use for ongoing daily checklists (morning routine, daily log). Today's completed tasks still show in the Active tab; yesterday's disappear to Previous Days overnight.

Quick-add from the right list

When you create a task from the Today, This Week, or This Month list view using the quick-add bar, the deadline preset is inferred automatically. The new task instantly appears in the list you're working from — no manual deadline selection needed.

Similarly, adding a task from inside a collection automatically assigns it to that collection.

Keep your collections tidy with TTL

For short-lived checklists — a packing list, a pre-flight checklist before a release, a shopping run — set a TTL (time-to-live) on the collection when you create it. Set it to 24 hours, 48 hours, or whatever makes sense. When the time is up, the collection and all its tasks vanish automatically. Zero cleanup required.

Use the import feature for bulk setup

If you have a long checklist in a spreadsheet or another tool, you can convert it to a .json file and import it directly into Tasks. This is the fastest way to bootstrap a new project with 20+ tasks. See the Features page for the exact JSON format.

Keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet

| Shortcut | Action | |----------|--------| | N | Open the new task form | | / | Focus the search bar | | Esc | Close the current dialog or form |