Outlining With Todoist

I am … more than a little obsessed with finding the right tool to help me outline.

Some of you may remember my “flagging” method from my old NaNoWriMo prep course.

I still think that’s a good basis, but the actual mechanics of all the little sticky notes and pages just didn’t hold up over time. There were too many fiddly bits, and moving a section of action around was a nightmare.

Spreadsheets didn’t work, either. Copy/paste was far too prone to user error, and it was difficult to get an overall sense of the story when you had to scroll through three pages of text to get to the chapter you were looking for.

Someday, I hope to revamp my old Outliner website so that it has the drag/drop capabilities and nesting that I want, but right now I don’t have the time for it.

So I’ve kept looking, and although I haven’t found the perfect fit? I found something pretty goshdarned close.

Todoist.

It’s a to-do website, so it’s got a lot of extra features I don’t need.

… but it’s also got a lot of features I DO need.

Each “list” can be considered a single outline. Items on the lists can be drag-dropped and moved around, and if something is indented, the program is smart enough to drag everything.

I can flag chapter elements with colors (though I’m not sold on the usefulness of this yet … it’s nice, though, and hearkens back to my flag colors).

I can show/hide each “chapter”, and the print view is pretty snazzy, too.

The free version is very very shiny, with just a few things in the paid version to make me consider taking the plunge.

It’s only got a few downsides. If I accidentally check off something, it shoots to the bottom of the page. There are some keyboard shortcuts that reorganize items by date, so I need to be careful not to hit any of those.

And although entering new items is about 85% perfect, it’s a little clunky and the fact that it’s a to-do app means it’s got more features than I need … but I have to swap between keyboard and mouse in order to access the ones I really DO need. No keyboard shortcuts for indenting an item, for example.

For all that, it’s so very close to what I was looking for that I’m not complaining. It’s more than good enough to bridge the gap till I build my own tool.