Building a mission-driven personal productivity system with Todoist

Executive overview

Most people have no productivity system, or they maintain one that isn't connected to what actually matters to them. The result is busy work: long task lists that generate motion but not progress.

The fix is to treat your task list as a commitment map, not a capture bucket — and anchor every item to a personal mission.

Todoist origins and company structure

• Built in 2007 for personal use in a university dorm room; published and grew organically
• Amir neglected it from ~2007–2011 while running Plurk (a Twitter competitor); returned full-time when he recognised the user base and product potential
• Company (Doist) is fully bootstrapped, remote-first, ~50 people across 20 countries at time of recording (July 2016)
• No traditional managers; everyone is a "doer-manager" in a flat, democratic structure
• Organisational goal: one platform covering individual task management, team task management, and internal team communication

Task list zero: how Amir runs his system

• Checks and processes email 2–3 times per day; converts anything requiring follow-up into a task
• Schedules tasks by urgency: urgent items for the same or next day, non-urgent deferred to next week
• Aims for both inbox zero and task list zero daily — reviews and reschedules incomplete items each evening
• Targets 15–20 tasks per day; acknowledges over-optimism is normal and reschedules without guilt
• Splits work into ~1-hour chunks — small enough for momentum, large enough to avoid trivial sub-tasks
• Uses priorities explicitly to surface high-impact work, not just urgency

Keeping the task list clean

• Todoist is for committed actions only — not ideas, brainstorming, or "maybes"
• Ideas and exploratory thinking go into a separate writing tool (Amir uses iA Writer); only enter Todoist once actioned
• An incomplete or unmaintained system is worse than no system — consistency is non-negotiable
• Repeatedly deferring a task is a signal to re-evaluate: does it need doing? Does it need doing by you?

Mercenary vs mission-driven productivity

• Mercenary style: doing tasks because they exist, with no connection to personal goals; reactive, scattered
• Mission-driven style: knowing what kind of person you want to be and what work is meaningful, then filtering tasks through that lens
• Connecting your task list to a personal mission statement makes prioritisation easier and reduces distraction
• Amir credits this shift as the biggest change in his own productivity

Company-level productivity experiments at Doist

• Squads (inspired by Spotify): small cross-functional teams (developer + designer + marketer) that own a feature end-to-end across all platforms
• OKRs (inspired by Google/Intel): objectives and key results set every quarter at individual, team, and company level — aligns everyone around measurable outcomes
• Internal communication handled via their own forthcoming team product, reducing internal email volume