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It’s Day One. Your team’s on the call, the screen share is up, and you’re about to walk them through Todoist.

A mistake most champions make is too much demoing and not enough doing. A team that watches you use Todoist for an hour has learned to watch you, while a team that uses it for an hour has actually started using it. Like the old saying about handing someone a fish versus teaching them how to catch one – one is a single meal, the other is a skill they’ll have for life.

So in this lesson, we’ll take you through a walkthrough agenda built around your team. And the best thing is that this agenda was created by a real Todoist champion, Sam, who runs a 12-person marketing agency, and has hosted this exact meeting more than once.

Your walkthrough should take about 60 minutes. And we’d recommend recording the call, so your team has something to reference later.

5 minutes: Why we’re doing this

Relay your one sentence that outlines the “why” behind this move. Is it to bring scattered work under one roof? No more missed deadlines or confusing, context-free tasks? If you completed lesson 1 of Set Up Your Team Workspace, feel free to use that.

5 minutes: Tour the shared projects

Open the workspace. Walk through the four projects you set up. Show the uncompletable README task in each. This is also your check that everyone can see every project they should – if someone’s missing one, add them right there on the call.

5 minutes: Create the first assigned task, live

Pick a real task that’s already on someone’s plate. Type it in. Add a due date. Assign it to that person. Have them open it on their screen. Complete it together while everyone watches.

This is the moment Todoist stops being a tool you’ve installed and starts feeling like real work can be done in it.

5 minutes: Today view

Show the team where their assigned tasks due today land: the Today view. Point out that the sidebar keeps team projects and personal projects separate – and that personal tasks are invisible to everyone else. Say that part out loud. Someone on the call will be relieved to hear it.

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15 minutes: Conventions

Decide these together, while everyone’s in the room:

• What goes in shared projects, what stays in personal projects
• Who assigns tasks (the project owner, anyone, both)
• What you do with tasks nobody owns yet
• How comments work: what’s expected vs. nice-to-have
• Approach to dates (when to start working on the task) and deadlines (a fixed date when a task is due)

25 minutes: Work time

Everyone finds or creates their first real task while you’re available to answer questions. The meeting ends when every person on the team has at least one task assigned to them.

You’re done with Day One when:

• One real task has been created, assigned, and completed live.
• Your conventions are agreed and written down somewhere your team can find them – the README task is a good home for them.
• Every team member has at least one task assigned to them.

That’s the hardest part behind you. What’s left isn’t onboarding, it’s just your team getting on with the work, in the place the work now lives.

Next: The first two weeks – reading the signals

Next up we’ll go through what to look out for in your team’s first two weeks.

“When you give others more responsibility, they find ways to improve tasks, flows, and processes.”

Steven Macdonald, Head of Content, INEVO