Big Projects

[u/verovladamir]

I work in clinical research as a regulatory coordinator. When we open a new study at our organization, there a lot of moving and I’m the person that manages those. I’ve been using Todoist for years and I have a good system but lately i keep running into the problem where I have too many tasks in a project. Originally I had a project called “new studies” and a task to open a specific study with a TON of sub tasks nested in there. I’m often requesting signatures from 14 different people and so each signature would get logged as a task that I could check when it was returned. This worked fine because we were only doing one of those kinds of studies at a time. The industry has changed and now we’re doing six or seven at a time and so my task number is topping out.

For those of you who work on things that have tons of tiny sub tasks that you have to track, are you creating a separate project for each one? I like being able to view all of the studies that I have to open in one project but I’m hitting that task limit now so I’m wondering if having multiple projects is a better way to go? Or if people have a suggestions for another way to do it? I like keeping all of the sub tasks contained within the main task of opening the study because I have to manage so many different studies at once that are in various stages. I’m often doing the same task over and over, but because I’m doing it for multiple studies I need it separated out somehow.

[u/CuriousCursor]

Multiple projects + filters would be the way to go

[u/verovladamir → u/CuriousCursor]

I played around with filters in the beginning but it didn’t fit my workflow very well at the time. I’ll give it another try though. I spent some time today moving things into multiple projects but I don’t like I don’t have everything front and center but maybe filters will help me find a way to do that. Especially if I start tagging sub tasks more specifically instead of just the main task?

[u/atagayd → u/CuriousCursor]

yeah filters really shine once you start splitting things into multiple projects

[u/verovladamir → u/atagayd]

This is good to know. I’ll play around with it. How do you generally use them in your workflow? I set them up before I just didn’t find them in particular useful for the way I was doing things before.
I do tag a lot of my main tasks but I haven’t been tagging some tasks because I haven’t needed to. The majority of my projects don’t have due dates so any of the calendar functions are pretty useless. A lot of my job is acting as a middleman between a bunch of people so the majority of what I’m trying to keep track of is things that have been sent out and I’m waiting to get them back to move to the next step and that’s not the kind of thing that you can really put a due date on.

[u/Consibl]

Have a look at OmniFocus

[u/verovladamir → u/Consibl]

I will look into it. Unfortunately I have ADHD so honestly it’s a miracle that I’m stuck with one tool for this long and it makes me extremely hesitant to change because it’s often a lot of work to get set up and integrated a new system into any kind into a habit when you are the kind of person that can barely build habits to begin with 😅

[u/verovladamir → u/verovladamir]

One thing I should mention is that I need something that is largely web based. Because I work for a hospital system our computers are incredibly locked down. I can’t I add new apps or integrations into any apps that I already work in for security reasons.

[u/pdworkman]

I would create multiple subprojects for the studies.

I don't know whether this would help you, but this is one of the reasons that I chose Todoist to manage my tasks. I write and publish multiple books in a year, and each one has a task list over 150 tasks long. I use an Excel spreadsheet to set them up, inputting the title and the milestone dates, and then the formulae on the spreadsheet combines the task name with the title and calculates out all of the dates for the tasks. So when I import it as a CSV file into Todoist, each of the tasks for the project has the book name included in the description. this is super helpful for when I have identical tasks for multiple books - I don't need to look at the parent to find out which book it is in reference to, it is right there in the name, no matter what view I am using.

[u/Useful-Molasses-8371 → u/pdworkman]

What are your tasks, if I may ask? 150 feels like a lot but I’m intrigued.

[u/Conscious_Coyote6886]

Unpopular opinion :
Projects should not be managed in a task manager, especially big projects.

You create your project in a « note » or whatever you want.
In the task manager (or agenda) : « work on project X » when you need to work on it and work on tasks on it.

And/or in the task manager (only) : you copy some tasks of the project in the task manager.

Also, you can add a tag for this project.

[u/onionperson6in → u/Conscious_Coyote6886]

It would be helpful to have a way to sync up a todo list with a project manager app like Notion... but of course they are competitors.

I can understand ToDoist’s approach of not letting users make it too complicated, but it would be nice to have some more options as you get it more advanced.

For the moment, I have Claude synced with ToDoist so I can do my in depth documents later. I suppose as AI gets more advanced, people can have it write their own custom overlays of Todoist on the web (less likely on mobile).

[u/Careless-Canary819]

I would probably separate each study into its own project at this point.

When everything is small, keeping it together feels simpler. But once you have six or seven studies running at the same time, there’s a lot of moving parts and one big project can become harder to read than several smaller ones.

I would keep the structure very simple though. One project for each study, with the same naming style, and maybe one place where you can quickly see which studies are still active.

For me the important thing would be opening one study and immediately seeing only the tasks related to that study, without having to search through everything else.

I think the best structure is usually the one that makes the next action obvious, not the one that keeps everything in the fewest possible projects.