How to Schedule a Task in Todoist (T)

With a task focused, pressing T opens the scheduler for it. The field accepts natural language, so typing 'tomorrow', 'next friday', 'every monday' or 'in 3 days' works directly and needs no date picker. **Single-letter shortcuts require a focused task, not a selected one.** Hovering a task with the mouse focuses it; so does moving through the list with the arrow keys. Without focus, T types a letter into whatever field has the cursor. This is the reason the letter shortcuts appear unreliable to new users — they work perfectly, but only once something is focused, and nothing in the interface announces that requirement. **Natural-language dates are the actual feature here.** Todoist's parser handles relative dates, weekdays, times and recurrence in one field: 'every other tuesday at 9am' produces a recurring task with a time, with no dialog and no repeat configuration screen. The parser also runs in the quick-add field, so a task can be created and scheduled in one line — typing the date phrase as part of the task name and letting Todoist lift it out. **Recurrence has a distinction worth understanding.** 'Every day' schedules the next occurrence a day after the due date, regardless of when you complete it. 'Every! day' — with an exclamation mark — schedules it a day after you actually complete it. For a task like watering plants, where the interval should run from the last time you did it rather than from a fixed calendar, the second form is what you want and the first produces a pile of overdue items. **Scheduling is not the same as deadlines or priority.** T sets when a task appears in Today and Upcoming. Priority, set with Y and a number, controls sort order and colour. Todoist also has a separate deadline field on plans that include it, distinct from the due date — the due date is when you intend to work on something, the deadline is when it must be finished. Conflating them is the usual reason a task list stops reflecting reality. **Bulk rescheduling works from the same shortcut.** Selecting several tasks and pressing T opens the scheduler for all of them at once, which is the efficient way to clear a backlog of overdue items — select the lot, press T, type 'tomorrow'. Doing that one task at a time is the single most common piece of unnecessary work in Todoist. **The neighbouring letters are worth learning together**, because they share the focus requirement and cover most of what you do to a task: T schedules, Y sets priority, E edits, and the number keys assign a project or label depending on the prefix. Learning them as a group is more efficient than one at a time, since the hard part — realising that focus is required at all — is shared across every one of them. **The parser understands your locale for ambiguous dates.** Typing 3/4 means the third of April or the fourth of March depending on the date format configured in settings, which is worth checking once rather than discovering through a missed deadline. Writing the month as a word — '3 apr' — sidesteps the ambiguity entirely and is the safer habit for anyone working across regions.