Archiving Todoist projects so I can see my week again

When fifteen tasks land on a Tuesday and Todoist says everything is fine

Todoist told me I had zero overdue tasks. My Tuesday told a different story.

On paper, the system was clean. No red badges. No overdue labels. But in the week view, about fifteen tasks were stacked on the same Tuesday. Not because I wanted to do fifteen things that day, but because they had drifted there over time.

The work was spread over four different projects. Some tasks were duplicated in slightly different wording. Some were effectively dead, but still technically active because I had never decided to remove them. Todoist was doing its job. I was the one pretending this was under control.

The problem was simple: I could not see my week anymore. I saw a tool that said everything was fine, and a calendar that said good luck.

How four projects quietly turned into noise

On their own, none of the projects were wrong. They made sense at the time I created them. A project for work, one for personal stuff, one for coaching, one for side experiments.

Over time, this created a few problems:

• Same idea, different project. A single piece of work could show up in two places. Different wording, same task.
• Dead tasks with polite names. Some tasks were never going to happen anymore because the context had changed. They sat there with nice verbs, quietly lowering the signal of the whole list.
• Dates as wishful thinking. Due dates were not deadlines. They were guesses. When the guess was wrong, I dragged the task to the next day. And the next. Until a random Tuesday had fifteen “must do” items.

The projects were meant to give structure. Instead, they gave me four partial pictures of the same week.

The reset: one project, three sections

I did not want to delete everything and start over. There was useful stuff in there. I just could not see it anymore.

So I archived three of the four projects and moved everything into a single project with three sections:

• Ritme
• Deze week
• Backlog

Ritme: the repeating heartbeat

Ritme is where the repeating tasks live. Things that actually happen on a rhythm: reviews, prep, admin, training.

I wrote about this earlier in The boring training week I can actually repeat.

This section is boring on purpose. It is not where ideas go. It is where the predictable parts of the week sit so they do not clutter everything else.

Deze week: a hard limit of five

Deze week is the only place where I allow myself active, non-routine tasks for the current week. And it has a hard limit: five tasks.

Not five per day. Five for the whole week.

On Friday, I open the backlog and pick at most five things that matter for next week. Those go into Deze week. Everything else, no matter how shiny or overdue it feels, stays where it is.

This does a few things immediately:

• If something is not important enough to be in the top five, it is not important enough to pretend I will do it next week.
• When a random Tuesday looks overloaded, I can see exactly which of the five weekly tasks are causing it, instead of hunting through four projects.
• The word “priority” stops being a label and becomes a trade-off.

Backlog: everything without a date

The Backlog is where all other tasks live. Ideas, someday items, things I might want to do but have not committed to. The rule is simple: no due dates in the backlog.

If something has a date, it is either part of the weekly five or a repeating task in Ritme. If it does not have a date, it stays in the backlog and waits for a future Friday to be chosen or ignored.

This separates “I should remember this exists” from “I will do this next week”. Todoist can track both, but I needed a visual line between them.

Archiving instead of deleting

I did not delete the old projects. I archived them.

More on this in my article Logging Food by Talking to Claude.

Archiving did two things:

• It removed them from daily view, so they stopped shouting for attention.
• It kept a record of what was there, so if I had misfiled something or changed my mind, I could still go back and rescue it.

This is a clean slate without the stress of wiping everything. “Delete” feels like a decision about the value of an idea. “Archive” is a decision about visibility.

The real problem was not Todoist

It is easy to blame the app. Change the tool, change the template, add a new label system, tweak the filters.

The honest cause here was simpler: a list does not fix forgetting. A fixed moment in the agenda does.

Fifteen tasks landed on a Tuesday because there was no recurring moment where I looked at the whole week and made actual choices. I used due dates as a low-friction way to say “not now” without ever saying “no” or “not this month”.

The structural change is not just the sections or the limit. It is the Friday slot.

Once a week, on Friday, I sit down and do three things:

Read also How I Split Social Posts Between Buffer and Manual Updates.

• Scan Ritme to see if the recurring stuff still makes sense.
• Pick at most five tasks from the backlog and move them to Deze week.
• Ignore everything else on purpose.

Todoist can store an infinite number of tasks. My week cannot. The calendar slot is where that mismatch gets resolved.

No fake productivity story

This is new. I am not going to claim it doubled my output or gave me extra hours a day. There is no before-and-after graph.

What I notice so far is that I can see my week again. When I open Todoist now, I do not get ambushed by a random pile of half-promises. I see a short list of things I chose, and a quiet backlog that is not pretending to be urgent.

That might not make me more productive in a measurable sense. It does make it harder to lie to myself about what will fit into a week. For now, that is enough.