How to move existing tasks from Todoist to Google Sheets?

Uf, it's been a while, but here I am to continue this great discussion!

@TheDavidJohnson, could you please specify, what do you mean by "Project" changes? Renaming of the project or moving the task to the other?

Maybe I haven't understood it right, but do you imply that I can use project names collected in Airtable in my zap where I want to trigger action on any new task in any project? If so, I cannot now think about how I can use this data. My options are very restricted on "When this happens..." part. Here are pictures attached to illustrate this.

@TheDavidJohnson, thank you for your reply! I'll answer it a little bit later!🙂

Interesting. I'm just now catching up on all of this and it seems like there are a few ideas worth pursuing. The one thing I'm wondering, @terbiy is this: when the "Project" changes, is that something that causes a task to be "updated" as well?

My thinking runs along these lines: If you're updating Airtable when a task gets "Updated," then you might be able to cause the latest "Project" name to be written to Airtable. This way, you'll have that data handy when you need to use it in a Zap like the one where you got stuck.

I hope this makes sense! It might be possible that I'm missing something here, but it seems feasible that something along these lines might be possible.

Hm, I know these kinds of things, I'm a front-end developer!😁 I tried to use the ”*” symbol as done in Bash, and what's surprising, I had even received the successful test on it. Unfortunately this happened only once and saving failed on attempts to test Airtable.

I also experimented with possible predefined values like ”all”. I concatenated the ids of several projects and separated them with comma. I used multiselection in Todoist client to see how the address gets formed, but multiselection doesn't influence it.

Thank you for adding my vote, @Danvers! This feature would be great, indeed. Maybe I will still implement the trigger for several projects to try the overall solution.

@Andrew_Luhhu, @PaulKortman, @Danvers, thank you for the ideas. I've tried to introduce a look-up table, but seem to either get it wrong or not to be able to use it.

On the initial "When this happens..." step I need to specify what project to observe for the new incomplete tasks. And what I want here is to say that I wish this zap to get triggered on the new task in any project. But this option is not available, and I need to choose only one.

The look-up table tool from utils is only available on "Do this..." step so I can't utilize it. Did I get it right or there is something that I've missed?

@terbiy checkout https://zapier.com/help/create/format/create-lookup-tables-in-zaps for what @Andrew_Luhhu was talking about.

bouncing off of what @Andrew_Luhhu suggested if you don't want to edit the zap each time you make a project you could have a spreadsheet "lookup table" that maps project ID to whatever you need.

And you could even have a zap that triggers off of a new project and writes a line to that spreadsheet so there's no manual input needed.

I thought that I've almost done it to the solution, but stopped in an unexpected place.

When building action on "New Completed Task in Todoist" event, I need to enter the required Project field. But projects in my approach are very dynamic, now I have 54 of them, so it seems like an inconvenient way to handle new tasks this way: to create 54 zaps. Should I start a new thread for this issue or continue this one?

@jesse, yes this is exactly what I was asking about! Thank you!☺️

Glad you're making progress @terbiy

As to your question to me - I'm not actually sure as I don't use Todoist very often. You may want to test or double check with Zapier support.

@Andrew_Luhhu's recommendation is definitely spot on.

I'm not sure how sophisticated we might want to get with this approach, but if you wanted to iterate through all the tasks that are not yet completed on a daily basis, then you could take this approach:

1. As tasks are created, push them to Google Sheets or Airtable (as @Andrew_Luhhu suggested). Include a status column (completed='Y' or 'N', for example)
2. When a task is completed (assuming that you're a Todoist Premium user with access to that trigger), the status could be updated via a Zap, as @Andrew_Luhhu pointed out.
3. With another Zap (triggered on an interval basis, such as daily), run a "find" on each task shown as not yet complete in your Google Sheet (I'd still prefer Airtable for this, but we'll stick with Google Sheets for simplicity). With a little testing, you could discover exactly which data points the "Find Task" search step would return, but the hope would be that it would return the due date. If so, you could then update your Google Sheet with the new due date. (This might also be used to return the current "Complete" or "Incomplete" status from Todoist if you're not using Todoist Premium, but this would need to be tested as well.) To actually execute this step, you would need to use some version of this looping process to loop through all the tasks that are not yet showing as complete. It would begin by checking your Google Sheet for the number of rows to come up with a count, then perform the "Find Task" search once for each row. This is where Airtable would really shine (over Google Sheets), because it's super simple to set up a view in Airtable that only includes the tasks that are not yet complete. That would eliminate the need to move the tasks around from one column to another, etc.
4. Once the last item has been returned from step 3, you could have your Zap trigger a notification to you to go check out the current list. This could be an email, a Slack notification, or whatever suits your fancy.
5. If you used Airtable to manage your analysis ("... from the perspective of time, place, risk and its mitigation."), you could easily set up views to help you sort, filter, and prioritize based not only upon the "overdueness" (if you'll pardon the term), but through some sort of numeric or other score that you assign for each of the factors you're analyzing. It could keep that information in a single table for you so that you always had a nice view representing the hierarchy you prefer, and then you could adjust the values each day for each incomplete or overdue task as needed.

I'll admit the above is a little crazy to set up at first, but it could save a ton of time if I'm understanding the end goal correctly.

@terbiy - yep you've hit upon one of Zapier's weaknesses - it doesn't really do "Find all" type scenarios.

My advice would be to add them to the Google Sheet as soon as they are created with their due date.

You can then remove them from the Google Sheet when they are marked complete.

The only scenario this doesn't cover is if the due date changes after the task is created. Does that happen in your use case?