How to Quick Add a Task in Todoist (Ctrl+Alt+A)

Pressing Ctrl+Alt+A on Windows (Cmd+Option+A on Mac) opens Todoist's floating Quick Add box from anywhere on your system, provided the desktop app is installed and running in the background with this global shortcut enabled in its settings — genuinely the single feature most responsible for Todoist's core promise that a thought, once captured, is never lost regardless of what you were doing at the moment it occurred to you. **Why "global" matters here specifically**: unlike most of the shortcuts covered across this site, which only function while their application has keyboard focus, this one works system-wide — triggering it while you're deep in a completely different application (a browser, a document, an email) opens the same Quick Add box without needing to first switch windows to Todoist, find it in your taskbar or dock, and only then start typing. **Within-app alternative**: pressing Q while already inside the Todoist app itself opens the identical Quick Add interface without needing the global system-wide shortcut — useful if you're already working within Todoist and just want the fastest path to adding a new task without navigating to a specific project first. **Full task detail in one motion**: the Quick Add box accepts Todoist's full inline syntax immediately — natural-language dates, @ for labels, # for projects, and !p1 through !p4 for priority — meaning you can type a fully detailed task ("Call dentist #Personal @phone tomorrow 10am") and press Enter, with every piece of that detail parsed and applied correctly without a single additional click or separate field. **Requirements for the global shortcut to work at all**: this specifically requires the Todoist desktop app (not just the web version accessed through a browser tab) to be both installed and actively running in the background, with the global shortcut feature explicitly enabled in the app's own settings — browsers genuinely cannot register a truly global, system-wide keyboard shortcut the way a native desktop application can, which is why the web-only version of Todoist has no equivalent to this specific capability. **Customizing the global shortcut**: if Ctrl+Alt+A (or Cmd+Option+A) conflicts with another application's own global shortcut on your system, Todoist's desktop app settings typically allow rebinding this specific shortcut to a different key combination — worth checking directly in-app if the default doesn't seem to register, since a conflicting binding claimed by a different application is a common reason a global shortcut silently fails to work as expected. **What happens to a task captured this way**: it lands wherever your typed # syntax routes it, or your account's default Inbox project if you didn't specify one — syncing near-instantly to every other device signed into the same account, consistent with Todoist's broader cross-device sync promise covered in this site's FAQ. **Related shortcuts**: T (scheduling) and the inline @ and # syntax, both covered in more depth on the task-capture category page, are what make this shortcut genuinely powerful rather than just a fast way to type a bare task title — combining Quick Add's global reach with the full inline syntax is what produces Todoist's signature fast, fully-detailed capture workflow. **Mistake to avoid**: assuming the global shortcut will work on a fresh install without checking that the desktop app (not just a browser tab) is actually running in the background is a common early source of confusion — the shortcut genuinely does nothing at all if the desktop app process isn't active, regardless of whether Todoist is open in a browser tab elsewhere on the same machine.