Does Todoist have a start date?

No. Todoist's date field schedules a task rather than deferring it, so one dated next Tuesday is visible in Upcoming from the moment you create it. Todoist says so directly: it "does not support start dates that hide your tasks until their start date is due." Its help centre offers six workarounds instead.

What people mean by a start date

Worth pinning down, because two different things get called the same name.

A scheduling date says when you intend to work on something. Todoist has this — it is the date field, and it puts the task in Today when the day arrives.

A start date, in the sense people search for, does something extra: it keeps the task out of sight until then. The task exists, it is captured, it is planned — and it does not appear anywhere you look daily until the day you said. Some apps call this a defer date, which is the clearer name.

The difference only matters at scale. With forty tasks you can see everything and skim. With four hundred, a list that shows you March in January is a list you stop reading, and that is the failure people are trying to fix when they search for this.

The six workarounds, and what each costs

Todoist's own article suggests these. They all work, and it is worth being clear-eyed about the price of each.

A separate "start" task. Create "start [project name]" with the date you want, and keep the real task in a Someday/Maybe project until then. Cost: two objects for one piece of work, and you now maintain the relationship between them by hand.

A recurring date. Set something like "every day starting 12 April and ending 30 April" so it appears in Today across the window. Cost: the task nags you every day of that window rather than appearing once, and while a recurring task can also carry a deadline, the deadline stays fixed while the recurring date moves — so you reset it each cycle, which is why Todoist advises against the pairing.

Deadlines. Put the real cutoff in the deadline field and the intended start in the date. This is the closest to a genuine two-date model and it is what I would do in Todoist. Cost: deadlines are a Pro feature, and the task still is not hidden before its date.

Filters. Write a filter that excludes what you do not want to see today. Cost: filters are a system you now own and maintain, and 150 filter views are Pro too. It also inverts the model — you are subtracting noise rather than never adding it.

Calendar sync, or reminders. Push the task into a calendar, or set a notification for when you should begin. Cost: the decision about what to do today now lives in a second app.

None of these is bad advice. But notice what they have in common: each one asks you to build and maintain a mechanism the app does not have. That is the real cost, and it is the thing the help article does not say out loud.

Why Todoist works this way

This is a design choice rather than an oversight, and it is defensible.

Todoist's model is that everything you have scheduled is visible, and that visibility is a feature — you are never surprised by something you forgot you deferred. Upcoming is a plan you can see across, not a queue that reveals itself a day at a time. For a lot of people that is genuinely the better default, and adding a hiding date would weaken it.

It also fits a shared list. If you assign someone a task that is invisible to them until next month, you have to be very sure that is what you meant.

What a real start date does instead

In TaskPocket the start date is the scheduling date and the deferring one: the task is out of Today until its day arrives, and Upcoming groups everything ahead by day so nothing is actually hidden — it is one click away rather than in front of you. Drag it to another day and you have rescheduled it, and nothing else moves.

Two consequences worth naming because they are the actual difference:

• Today only contains today. Not "today plus everything I optimistically scheduled and then postponed", which is what a single scheduling field turns Today into over a few months.
• A deadline on a repeating task moves with the series. Quarterly filing that recurs on a rhythm and is genuinely due on a fixed day works in both products — but in Todoist the deadline stays where you put it while the rhythm advances, so it needs resetting every cycle. Here it advances with the task, keeping its distance from the start date.

The start date is on the free plan, along with unlimited tasks and the whole repeat engine. The deadline field and the Deadlines view are Premium, which is the same shape as Todoist charging for deadlines under Pro. Both products paywall the second date.

Before you switch for this one field

It would be a thin reason on its own, and there are better ones and worse ones.

Todoist has reminders and notifications, native apps on every platform, sharing, an established API and hundreds of integrations. TaskPocket has none of those. If your list works today and the only irritation is that Upcoming shows you too much, a filter is a smaller change than a migration — and Todoist's filters are good.

The date model is worth moving for when it is the shape of your problem: a list large enough that visibility is the bottleneck, mostly solo, and you are already paying for Pro to get the second date.