Announcing The Missing ToDoist Tools
TMTDT: The Missing ToDoist Tools 🎉
As the name implies, TMTDT started as a small collection of scripts that I used to augment ToDoist with features they can’t/won’t implement. It’s grown quite a bit since then.
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I don't know how to make flashy demo gifs. See the file driving the demo
Those scripts started as simple idea and quickly morphed into a creaky, but essential, tool. As more features were added it continued too morph into an unmaintainable mess. Untangling that mess was on my todo list but never a high priority partly because of issues TMTDT was designed to solve 🤦.
I lost my day job right as the spring of 2020 shelter in place order was put in place. TMTDT is certainly not how I thought early summer was going to be spent, but a useful way nonetheless.
One significant chunk of my newly-freed time and a lengthy re-write later, I had something that looked promising. After a lot more work and some tinkering, I’ve got something that feels like far more than a hacky tool for personal use.
Why
Why not?
I had several scripts that I would run on a regular basis to do things like:
- set up projects with multiple different types of templates based on things like the date
- fix typos i routinely made while quick adding tasks.
- re-schedule certain daily tasks if they had been missed
No joke, I’d spend a lot of time fixing typos, expanding ideas for a project into proper sub-tasks and sections and other routine administrative work:
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Representative of time spent during a typical week
In that specific week, I kept track of how 37 hours were spent. Of those 37, about 4 were spent on general Inbox review / process. At least 3 of those 4 were spent directly on task triage. 3/37 is about 8%. With no full time day job - hire me - that’s a fairly representative breakdown for a given week; some time planning the things, lots of time doing the things.
What would you do with 8% of your time back each week?
I’m kidding.
We all know that I’m not getting any free time back from this.
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I’ve written this software to suit my needs, but the decision to make it a bit more robust and featured before release is because I’ve noticed a few ’new’ tools to better augment ToDoist:
- autodoist
- shortcuts
- taskbutler
- planner. This is more of a UI, but it’s a very pretty app.
And I’m genuinely curious about how other people will user it. I am always appreciative when somebody finds a smart way to save some time and shares their trick. I’m hoping somebody figures out how to use this tool in a way that I can learn from.
An announcement post for TMTDT is now on /r/todoist.
How
The code and some documentation can be found on GitHub.
The demo gif at the top of this post illustrates a simple example, but more through (read: contrived) examples are included in the jobs directory.
The short version:
Scriptable tools for building jobs to manage a TooDoist account
Slightly longer version:
Architecture inspired by Elastic Search’s Curator. Functionality built for ToDoist.
Demo
The full set of resources for the demo are here, but the ‘meaningful’ parts are below:
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