Getting Started with toodoori

If the previous guide showed you what Kanban is, this one walks you through actually building a board in toodoori and completing your first card. Five minutes is enough. You don’t need to learn every feature at once — start by making a single card and moving it.

1. Open Your Default Project

In toodoori, one board is one Project. Your default project opens after your first sign-in.

  • You can rename the default project later in settings.
  • Start by moving one real task through this board from beginning to end.

2. Understand the Four Workflow Groups

toodoori prepares the big stages your work moves through. Every board is made of four Workflow Groups.

  • Inbox: A place to drop whatever comes to mind. You can organize later.
  • Planning: Where you bring the specific things you’ll do soon.
  • In Progress: What you’re working on right now.
  • Finished: What you’ve completed.

These four groups are fixed, so work moves through the same flow on every board.

3. Add Your Own Stages

Within each group, you can create finer columns. We call these Stages.

For example, placing ‘Deep Work’ and ‘Waiting for Feedback’ inside ‘In Progress’ makes it clear exactly where a task is stuck. Stages can be reordered by dragging, and you can name them however you like.

You don’t need many at the start. 5 Personal Kanban Board Examples gives you stage names and sample cards for daily tasks, projects, study, publishing, and home routines.

4. Create Your First Card

Now turn a task into a card. Whatever comes to mind can go into the Inbox with “Add Task.”

Add only as much detail to each card as you need.

  • Due date: By when. (Optional.)
  • Checklist: For breaking a big task into smaller steps.
  • Labels: When you need to categorize, like ‘Urgent’ or ‘Study.’
  • Notes: For context or memos.

For more on how each piece of information on a card is used, see Task Cards; for organizing with labels and filters, see Organizing.

5. Build Flow by Moving Cards

The heart of Kanban is moving the status. Drag a card from Inbox → Planning → In Progress, and what you’re working on shows up plainly on the board.

You don’t have to move everything at once. Pulling just one card into In Progress for today is enough. This “one card at a time” is the rhythm toodoori encourages.

6. Set a WIP Limit on ‘In Progress’

Piling many tasks into In Progress at once tends to mean nothing gets finished. toodoori lets you set a WIP limit (how many tasks can sit there at once) on stages in the ‘In Progress’ group, in Soft or Hard mode. Start with Soft to gauge your own capacity. For how to set it up, see the flow feature; for why WIP limits work, see WIP Limits: Choosing What to Start and What to Defer.

7. Finish, and Look Back

When a task is done, move its card to Finished. Completed work doesn’t disappear.

  • Archive: Collects your finished tasks. You can always pull them back out.
  • Past Work: Pick a period and revisit completed tasks and their related records.

It’s okay if a deadline has passed. toodoori won’t nag you — just set a new date you can keep.

For more on how each of these is used, see Looking Back.

Ways to View Your Board

Use Today, Unfinished, and All in Board navigation to choose which tasks appear. Today includes unfinished tasks due today or earlier and your manual choices. Follow Today: Choose Your Daily Tasks to make a selection without moving cards between stages.

The tabs above the board switch between Board, Timeline, and Past Work.

  • Board: The default screen, with cards laid out by status.
  • Timeline: For seeing tasks with start and due dates across time.
  • Past Work: For reading the history of what you finished, period by period.

Project names, stages, colors, and display settings are covered in Make It Yours.

Next Steps

You now know the flow of creating, moving, and completing your first card. To go deeper —

Your First Card Starts Here

Choose what to work on, then keep completed work and its stage history as a record.

Create Your First Card