Todoist Needs Its Asana Moment

Daniel Kuney -

If it wants to win over teams, it’s time for Todoist to build a project management layer that competes with the big players.

Todoist is one of the best personal task management apps out there. Copied widely, but hard to beat (sorry TickTick).

Todoist excels at capturing tasks quickly, primarily through its natural language processing and upcoming Ramble mode, which I predict will be a killer feature for them.

Todoist also excels at boiling tasks down to their essence: a Today view to see what’s on your plate today, an Upcoming view to help plan your capacity over the next week, and filters and labels to view your tasks in endlessly customizable ways, helping you focus on your work on your terms.

A few years ago, they embarked on a mission to make their service a better task management app for teams. And in January 2024, they released teams workspaces.

However, outside of adding dedicated workspaces for teams that can coexist alongside personal task collections, they didn't do much. At least when compared with true team project management apps like Asana, Monday, and ClickUp.

Instead, Todoist has spent the last couple of years adding calendar support for time-blocking tasks, a concept popularized by Motion, Sunsama, and Akiflow.

However, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not convinced that most users want to, or should, time-block their tasks.

What teams need is to understand how tasks fit into a bigger picture, from an organization's goals to how they're managing individual capacity.

This is what Asana gets right (even if Asana is mired in a clunky and cumbersome UI) and why I suspect Asana is dominating the project management market.

If you're a project lead, business owner, or manager, you want to see how all the tasks fit together into a bigger picture. And that's what Asana does exceptionally well.

If Todoist wants to compete in this space, especially now that newer entrants, such as Monday, ClickUp, and Linear, are already nipping at the heels of Asana, it needs its project management moment.

Currently, if team members click into a project in Todoist, they get a list of tasks and…that’s it. That’s just not going to cut it if Todoist wants to attract more teams.

Like Asana, Todoist should create views for managers to view tasks from a 30,000-foot view, both across the organization and within teams.

These would include:

  • Project home pages to give team members a 360 view of a given project, including goal progress, a list of fellow teammates and their workloads, and milestone completion;
  • Milestones that can sit within tasks to assess the completion of significant milestones, or a collection of tasks, within a project;
  • Team, Project, and Organization-wide Goals to track progress from a bigger picture;
  • Capacity management to track if people and time are being used effectively.

If Todoist can match Asana’s project management tools, they could give Asana a run for their money and grab a slice of the $700,000,000+ market that Asana commands.

What else would you like to see from Todoist? Let me know in the comments below or on Threads or BlueSky.