I am still relatively new to Todoist but I have quickly adopted it into my daily workflow. As with all tools I use often, I believe it is important to become as proficient as possible in them. As such, I watched the following video with Gabriela Brasil and Chase Warrington.
There are 2 little tips that I learned. The first which I adopted immediately is the difference between “every” and “every!”. If I say:
every week starting wednesday
This task will be due on Wednesday and when I mark it as complete, a new occurrence will be scheduled with a due date of the following Wednesday. If I say:
every! week starting wednesday
This task will be on Wednesday. When I mark it as complete, a new occurrence will be scheduled one week from when I completed it. So, if I mark is as complete on Monday, the next instance will be due 1 week from Monday.
The second tip I have not used yet is this concept of an “uncompletable” task. This is a task that appears but without the circle control to mark it as complete. These tasks are created by starting the task text with an asterisk and a space. For example:
I just posted to testingpodcast.com our 2300 post. Testingpodcast.com is a podcast aggregation site focused on software testing. I took over the site back in 2011. For the last 5 years, I have been posting almost every business day since. If I have too many posts queued up, I will sometimes post on the weekend or more than once a day.
I am grateful for all of the content creators who allow me to include their podcasts on the site.
In general, using templates or recurring tasks fulfill most use cases for adding routine tasks to Todoist. Occasionally, there are a set of tasks which could use some more complex logic around the text of the task, calculating due dates, etc. On the Mac, I usually turn to AppleScript.
So, we start with a very basic Apple Script function that can be called from within your main script.
on addItem(args)
set defaultArgs to {priority:1, schedule:""}
set args to args & defaultArgs
set content to content of args
set labels to labels of args
set priority to priority of args
set schedule to schedule of args
set token to "GET FROM YOUR ACCOUNT"
set myUUID to do shell script "uuidgen"
set tempUUID to do shell script "uuidgen"
set due to "{\"string\":\"" & schedule & "\"}"
set tdCommand to "[{\"type\": \"item_add\",
\"uuid\": \"" & myUUID & "\",
\"temp_id\":\"" & tempUUID & "\",
\"args\": {
\"content\": \"" & content & "\",
\"due\":" & due & ",
\"priority\":" & priority & ",
\"labels\":" & labels & "}}]"
set curlCmd to "curl https://api.todoist.com/sync/v8/sync -d token=" & token & " -d commands='" & tdCommand & "'"
do shell script curlCmd
end addItem
This function depends on 2 external programs:
curl
uuiden
Once we have this function, it can then be used inside of a script, for example:
display dialog "Please enter some text to prefix the task :"
set entryPrefix to text returned of result
set labelIds to "[1111111111, 1111111112]"
addItem({content:"(" & entryPrefix & ") " & "Task text", priority:2, labels:labelIds})
