In the first two weeks your team will have questions, and that’s a good sign, because a question usually means someone’s engaged enough to want this to work.
Four of them come up again and again. Some are genuine knowledge gaps, where your team simply doesn’t know the answer yet, and others are resistance in a polite costume: not really a question so much as a subtle objection.
Telling the two apart changes how you answer, so this is how to spot the difference and what to say either way.
1. “Who can see my tasks?” / “Do I have to put everything in here?”
These are really the same question, and it’s usually a genuine one, because people want to know where the line falls between shared and private.
The answer is the sidebar, which has two zones. My Projects is yours alone and invisible to everyone else on the team, while the team workspace is shared. Anyone in a shared project can see what’s inside it. For example the tasks, assignees, due dates, and comments. People who aren’t in that project see nothing at all, so if 4 of your 12 people are in Marketing Operations, only those 4 see anything in it.
So no, not everything has to go in the shared space. The dentist appointment, the side project, the thing one team member memorably described as “my wax appointment scheduled for tomorrow” can all live in My Projects, where no one else will ever see them.
There’s usually a worry underneath all this, and it isn’t really about the tasks at all. It’s about the account activity in Reporting. People assume that changing a due date three times will look bad, and it won’t. It looks like real life, and real work.
2. “How is this different from the tool we already use?”
Sometimes this is a knowledge gap, but more often it’s something closer to “I don’t want to migrate everything right now.”
The good news is they don’t have to do it all at once. New work goes into Todoist as it comes up, starting now, and existing work moves over in waves, a project at a time, as each one comes back around, rather than in one overwhelming afternoon of copying and pasting. It’s usually the fear of that afternoon that keeps people on the old tool, so naming it out loud, and showing them it isn’t what you’re asking for, is what tends to unstick them.
3. “What if I forget to update it?”
On the surface this looks like a knowledge gap, but underneath it’s usually “I don’t want one more thing to maintain.”
It’s worth being honest here, because Todoist isn’t no effort. Your team does need to add their tasks, assign them, and leave the occasional comment. But the effort is small, and more importantly it can be fixed: open the Today view once in the morning and once at the end of the day, and whatever needs attention is already waiting there whenever you check-in. There’s no separate list to keep and nothing to go hunting for. It’s one habit that serves the organization of your work and personal life, under a single roof.
4. “Is there training, or am I on my own?”
This is often the polite version of “I’m not going to figure this out by myself” and it’s understandable, but they’re not alone. There’s a whole Team Members: Find Your Way course built for exactly this: short, supportive, hands-on, and designed so that someone can get going without having to come to you for the basics. You can point them to it directly, with something like:
“There’s a short Team Member’s course that walks you through it. Have a look, and if anything’s still unclear afterwards, come find me.”
That last line is the part that matters. “Come find me” tells them the track isn’t you offloading them onto a document – it’s that you’re still there if they need you.
When you do spot resistance dressed up as a question, the remedy is often the same. Say the concern as communicated out loud, and then give the concrete fix. People resist far less once they’ve heard that you understood what they were actually asking. Perhaps they just wanted to feel validated too.
So when that first question arrives, listen for the layer underneath it, and answer both at once.
And that’s everything. That’s the Run the Full Rollout course complete.
It’s worth stopping for a second on what that actually means. A while ago, Todoist was something you believed in but hadn’t yet handed to anyone else. Since then you’ve written the why, built a workspace simple enough to start in, invited the right people first, watched the early signals, steadied a stall, and got ready for the questions.
From here, you’re not rolling Todoist out anymore. Your team is just doing their work, and you’re the reason it’s working well.
If anything comes up that you’re not sure how to handle, our Help Center has most of it covered, and our support team is one click away from there.
Go get ‘em, Champ.