Todoist Scheduler + Templates

Is this for you?

If you want to:

• store tasks that are in the far future without cluttering your Todoist
• have complex recurring tasks such as every week pick next item from the list of tasks and schedule it
• use your own templates for projects

then YES you should try it.

Dependencies

• Dateutil
• PyTodoist
• toml

Setup

1. Clone the repo:

   git clone https://github.com/ViliamV/todoist_scheduler.git
   cd todoist_scheduler/

2. Install the dependencies:

     pip install -r requirements.txt --user

3. Run ./todoist_scheduler.py and follow the instructions

Usage

usage: todoist_scheduler.py [-h] [-f FORWARD] [-v] [--template TEMPLATE]

Todoist Scheduler can store future one-time or recurring tasks for Todoist in
plain text and create a task in Todoist when they are needed. Also offers more
features regarding a set of repeating tasks.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help           show this help message and exit
  -f FORWARD           Execute tasks due in next X days.
  -v                   Verbose output.
  --template TEMPLATE  Run template file TEMPLATE

Creating tasks

Interactive

You can create tasks using task_creator.py. They will be stored in directories tasks, but you can change it in todoist_scheduler.conf.

Manual

Each task is a separate plain text file in TOML format that can be easily modified. To modify or create a new task, follow these conventions:

• project - the name of Todoist project. If in doubt, use "Inbox".
• tasks - task/tasks. Add as many as you want. They are strings (" ") in the array ([ ])
• date - ISO format of due date of the next task
• early - how many days in advance should be task put into Todoist. Number followed by word (or starting letter of a word) day/week/month/year.
• interval - for recurring tasks is an interval of repetition. It is a string containing number followed by word (or starting letter of a word) day / week / month / month on the last day / year.
• index - for recurring tasks this is an index of the next task to be processed, indexing starts from 0.
• priority - integer. 0 = no priority, 1 = low priority, 2 = normal priority, 3 = high priority, 4 = very high priority. The default value is 2.

Creating templates

Templates are TOML files as well. Example template looks like this:

name = "Test template"
color = "RED"
due_date = "2018-11-26"
priority = 2

[[tasks]]
task = "Do stuff before"
when = -1

[[tasks]]
task = ["Do stuff on that day", "Do other stuff"]
priority = 3

[[tasks]]
task = "Do stuff after"
when = +1

• every parameter is optional
• name defaults to 'Template'
• color defaults to 'LIGHT_BLUE' Use one of the following:
  • GREEN
  • PINK
  • LIGHT_ORANGE
  • YELLOW
  • DARK_BLUE
  • BROWN
  • PURPLE
  • GRAY
  • RED
  • DARK_ORANGE
  • CYAN
  • LIGHT_BLUE
• due_date for project in YYYY-MM-DD format, defaults to today
• priority defaults to 2 (normal), task priority is used over project priority
• when is delta in days (plus or minus) from the project date and it defaults to 0
• task can be string or an array of strings

You can execute template by running ./todoist_scheduler.py --template example_template.toml --date 2018-09-27

This is the result:

Automation

CRON

TODO

Bash aliases

In order to speed up adding a new task, you can create aliases in you .bashrc or .bash_aliases:

alias task='python3 /path/to/todoist_scheduler/task_creator.py'
alias todoist='python3 /path/to/todoist_scheduler/todoist_scheduler.py'

Running tasks scheduled for later

When you will not be able to execute the script for the next x days, run:

    $ ./todoist_scheduler.py -f x

Motivation

I made Todoist Scheduler because I wanted more control over my recurring tasks in Todoist. I spend some time every week decluttering - deleting old contacts, archiving emails, organizing files. I liked the idea of having a list of tasks and looping over it in Todoist in specified intervals. However, to my knowledge, it is not possible. That's why I created this script and liked the clean look of empty Todoist (no recurring tasks that are not needed for 2 months) so I extended the functionality to one-time tasks as well. Recently I also added support for Project templates which is more useful than I expected.