Create a Gantt chart from your Todoist project with Ganttify in 3 easy steps

If you’re like me, you’re probably actively managing all your todos, tasks, upcoming meetings or even your home chores in Todoist. Get that daily overview of what’s on your plate and easily “set and forget” tasks. Once it’s in your Todoist, you know it will get done when you’re ready for it.

Prerequisities

For this guide, I’m assuming you have both a Todoist and a Ganttify account. If you don’t have these accounts yet, go ahead and sign up for these services first.

1. Selecting the Todoist projects

When you’re looking at your project list in Ganttify, you see all of your Todoist projects represented with their corresponding colors and indentation.

Now, you can click on each row in the project list to select that project. For this example, we’re going to select the projects Product Roadmap , Blog Post and Feature Planning (all very useful Todoist templates).

Select each of the projects and click the Open Gantt Chart button at the top of the page. Now, Ganttify will load the Gantt chart view of the selected projects.

2. The Gantt chart view in Ganttify

Once the Gantt chart has loaded, we’re immediately greeted with a slightly intimidating grid view of all our tasks:

Don’t worry, we’re going to customize this view to our needs and start planning a.s.a.p.!

Hiding and showing columns

• Task

  This is the label of your task. (Sub) projects are prefixed with “Project:” and sections in projects are prefixed with “Section”.

• Label(s)

  The labels of your Todoist task show up in this column.

• Assignee(s)

  If a task is assigned to someone, their name is displayed here.

• Priority

  Todoist works with priorities when creating tasks (P1, P2, P3 and P4). These priorities are represented in the Gantt chart as “high”, “medium” and “low” with an empty column if a task has default (P4) priority.

• Start

  This is the start date of your Todoist task (yes, using Ganttify you can now set start and end dates on your tasks in Todoist! More on that later.)

• End

  This is the due date of your task.

• Days

  The days column displays a numeric representation of the duration of your task. If you zoom in, this will for example change to “hours” or “minutes”. “Days” is the highest level for duration notation.

• Todoist

  This column shows a Todoist icon in each row. Clicking this icon will instantly open this particular project or task in Todoist via a popup window.

Let’s get started with the columns on the left side of the Gantt chart. As you can see, we’re not using any labels in our current projects. Nor do we have any assignees since this project is mine alone.

Since these columns won’t be used in this particular Gantt chart, let’s hide them.

Most actions in Ganttify involve the right-mouse click context menus.

Move over to the headers of the columns you wish to hide, right-click on the header and choose hide column from the context menu. Most actions in Ganttify involve the right-mouse click context menus. Feel free to click on different elements in the interface to see your available options.

Now that we’ve hidden all the unnecessary columns, we drag on the right side of the Task column to resize it so we can properly read our task labels. Now, you should have something like this:

3. Start planning!

We’ve customized the interface to suit our needs. Now we’re ready to start planning!

Remember that tip from earlier? Nearly all actions in Ganttify can be achieved using the right-mouse click. Let’s try that again! Right-click in the row of a task where you wish to set a start and end date. A context menu pops up showing two options:

1. Add timeblock
2. Set due date

Adding a time block will create a block in this row that you can drag around to reposition it. If you drag the left side of the block, you’re updating the start date. If you drag the right side of the block, you’re updating the end date. Drag the middle and you will move the entire block horizontally.

Time blocks are a very powerful way to plan tasks over multiple days.

The other option you have is setting a due date. Setting a due date on a Todoist task in Ganttify is similar as setting a due date on a task in Todoist. In Ganttify, it creates a check mark as a representation of the moment the task needs to be ‘done’.

Gantt chart position of due dates

The bottom of the checkmark, the ‘sharp point’, points to the moment where the task is due. If the checkmark is placed in the middle of a (day-sized) grid square that means the task is due at 1pm (middle of the day). If you pace it on the line at the end of the day, the task will be due at 5pm.

Now that you’ve learned the basics of planning in Ganttify, your Gantt chart starts to represent a timeline of all your tasks, and you can see at a glance the relation between tasks and their duration.

In a future post we’ll go into more detail about global Gantt chart settings, zooming, using filters to display tasks with certain priority or assignee(s) and how to set dependencies on your Todoist tasks.

Get started with Ganttify for Todoist

If you haven’t already, make sure you sign up for Ganttify and start your free trial today!