You can mark any Rem as a todo to indicate it's a task that needs to be accomplished. Todos are easily distinguished from other Rems by the checkbox on the left, which you can click when you finish the task.
Todos allow you to seamlessly integrate your workflow into your notes, tracking tasks for future work, creating custom views of relevant todos via search portals, and viewing all tasks in one place across all notes.
Creating todos
Press Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Return on a Mac) to turn a Rem into an unfinished todo. Pressing Ctrl+Enter a second time will mark it as finished, and pressing it a third time will turn it back into a normal Rem (not a todo anymore).
You can achieve the same effect by typing /todo or /task and selecting the Todo option.
✨ Tip: Pressing Enter to add another Rem while you are at the end of a todo Rem will also make the new Rem into a todo, to make it easier to create long lists of todos. If you want to return to a normal Rem, press Enter one more time.
Changing todo status in bulk
You can use /todo or Ctrl+Enter after highlighting multiple Rems, too. However, this might not achieve what you want if some todos are in a different state than others, as it toggles each of the Rems individually – that is, if some selected items are complete and others are unfinished, the unfinished ones will become complete and the completed ones will become normal Rems. In this case, you can use the /finish todo and /unfinish todo options, which will have no effect if a Rem is already in the finished or unfinished state, respectively.
Finding Todos
Sometimes you might create a to-do list for a particular day or project, and simply seeing the items in a single document will be sufficient. But at other times, you may want to see todos that are in different documents all in one place. There are several ways to accomplish this.
List of all todos
You can find a list of all your todos in the Todo power-up. Get here quickly using the View All Todos option on the omnibar (Ctrl+K; Cmd+K on a Mac).
List of todos matching some query
If you have a Pro or Life-Long Learner account, you can create arbitrarily complex searches for todos using Search Portals.
First, insert a new search portal into a document in a convenient place (/isp).
Next, select the visual query builder icon and search for Is Tagged With Todo. This will display all todos.
Finally, add additional criteria as necessary – for instance, to display only todos that are descendants of some document, or that have a different tag.
✨ Tip: To filter on whether a todo is finished or unfinished, search for Any Connection To Finished or Unfinished.
Example Workflows
Todos are perfect for the workplace, but students and researchers may also find them useful!
Using todos as a student
Both in and out of the classroom, todos can be an essential asset for your coursework at any level of education, from high school up through to the most advanced degrees.
Keep track of assignments by making them to-dos, tagged with their deadlines. Later you can even attach your finished product or a link to it to quickly find it.
When taking notes in class or while reading textbooks or papers, make any note you don't understand fully into a todo so you can return to it and read/research further.
Come up with questions to ask as questions in class or during office hours and label them as tasks as a reminder to ask them; then, you can even write out the answer underneath!
Using todos in the workplace
There is no shortage of uses for task management in the workplace, but here are some ideas and strategies for how to use the tool to bolster your productivity even further.
Turn meeting minutes into todo’s and tag them with the teams that need to complete them and the deadlines.
Tag your to-dos with labels to indicate progress or stages such as “urgent”, “planning”, “in process” or “overdue”.
Make todos whenever you have to leave notes unfinished or take them in a hurry as a reminder to go back and add more or finish the task.
Using to-dos for research
Research often involves long-term objectives and steps; todos can be an excellent way to track progress and set intermittent deadlines.
Every time you come across a new paper or hear about a possible source, make a set of todos to find it, read it and take notes from it.
When working on a prolonged project, make yourself a todo for every day or every week (using the daily docs system) with an incremental objective as a way of planning ahead and incentivizing/tracking progress.