Set Up Your Team Workspace is four short lessons on rolling Todoist out to your team, from the first conversation to everyone working in it. This is lesson one.
You get it. You wholeheartedly believe in it. So this lesson isn't here to sell you on Todoist, it's about the harder job: bringing along a team who haven't seen what you've seen yet. That's a big task, and doing it well is mostly about the first few moves, so this lesson is here to make those moves as easy as possible. Get them right and the rest follows more smoothly than you'd think.
In our experience, teams who succeed start with one sentence about why they're doing this.
It's tempting to skip this step, but it's worth the time. Without it, you can reach week two and find that nobody's really assigning anything to anyone, and the reason is not always apparent: for a lot of people, assigning a task to a colleague can feel intrusive, and asking how it's all meant to work can feel like admitting they don't get it. None of that is about you, or even about Todoist. It's just what's going on under the surface, and naming it is half the battle.
By the end of this course, you'll have a short Welcome Kit ready to send your team – a doc that tells them why they've been added, what to do first, and who to ask when they're stuck. You don't need to think about it yet, but a few of the things you write today will end up in it. We'll come back to it properly in Lesson 3.
So open a doc, and answer these four questions in order.
1. What problem are we solving?
Sum it up in one sentence. Is it missed deadlines? Does work feel scattered across email, chat, and three different docs? Nobody quite sure what's actually a priority?
Make the sentence something about something you can act on: "Project deadlines keep slipping because nobody knows who owns what" will always beat a more general "We want to be more organized."
2. Who is this for?
How many people? Which team? And (most importantly) who's likely to push back. The skeptic on your team can be a real measure of success. The day they stop working around the system is the day it's actually working. Plan for them now.
3. What does success look like at 30, 60, and 90 days?
Pick signals you can actually check. Something like:
- Every active task has someone's name on it.
- Every task for the Q4 campaign launch lives in Todoist by the end of the year.
- At the one-month mark, nobody needs reminding to put work where the rest of the team can see it.
4. What's the timeline?
Put all three of these in your calendar before you close the doc.
- A kickoff date.
- A check-in one week later.
- A 30-day review.
And that's it! We've found that a date not scheduled is a milestone that doesn't happen, so take the time to be specific now, and watch your goals come to fruition.
Put it all together
The sentence you write in question one about what problem you want to solve isn't just for this exercise. It's the base of the thread running through check-in conversations, and every "wait, why are we doing this again?" that comes up over the next month. It's also the first line of the Welcome Kit you'll send your team, so they know why they've joined and where to go when they're stuck.
Five minutes of thinking now can save you that conversation a dozen times over.
Write it now, before you set up anything else.
We on [team name] are using Todoist because [specific problem]. By [enter milestone], we want [one concrete signal that it's working].
For example: We on the Marketing team are using Todoist because campaign tasks are scattered across email, chat, and individual to-do lists, and things keep slipping. By the end of the month, we want every active task to have an owner and a due date, with no more chasing status updates.
Keep it to two sentences. If you can read it back to the person on your team most likely to roll their eyes, and they nod – you've got it.
In the next lesson you'll get the step-by-step on creating your team's workspace.
"Great teams are built deliberately upon shared values."
Google's Project Aristotle research