Todoist Task Adding Project

Idea behind this project is to make it easier to plan your studies. You can add tasks to Todoist and then visualize them in a chart. See how I use it myself in section How I use this project.

This project provides a Python script for adding tasks to your Todoist account. Functions for adding tasks from csv file are located in the todoist.py file. See documentation of the file in Todoist adding functions section.

Additionally, the script can be used to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) chart from active tasks on your Todoist account. For that purpose, the script uses the draw.io. Draw.io is a free online diagram software for making flowcharts, process diagrams, org charts, UML, ER and network diagrams. Created with draw.io, the WBS chart can be exported as a PNG file and it can be modified further in a draw.io.

In chart is marked the sections, labels that I use to mark courses, and below courses are the tasks. Tasks have a priority, which is marked with different colors.

Features

• Fetch active tasks, projects, and sections from Todoist.
• Visualize tasks in an XML chart with customizable styling.

Prerequisites

• A Todoist account.
• An API token from Todoist. Read more about Todoist API documentation here.

Getting Started

To use this script, you need to change the values in muuttujat.txt to your own.

1. Add your Todoist API token to the muuttujat.txt file.

2. Rename muuttujat.txt to muuttujat.py. This changes the file into a Python module that can be used in the script.

Activate the virtual environment

Activate the virtual environment with a nested shell provided by Poetry:

poetry shell

To deactivate the virtual environment, type:

exit

Todoist functionality

Function Name	Description	Parameters	Returns
get_all_projects	Retrieves all projects from Todoist.	api_key (str): API key for authentication.	List of Project objects.
get_one_project	Retrieves a specific project by its ID.	api_key (str): API key. project_id (int): ID of the project.	Project object or None if an error occurs.
get_all_sections	Retrieves all sections in a project.	api_key (str): API key. project_id (int): ID of the project.	List of Section objects or None.
add_new_task	Adds a new task to Todoist.	api_key (str): API key. task (Task): Object containing task details.	Added Task object or None.
find_item_id	Finds an item (e.g., project or section) by name and returns its ID.	items (list): List of items to search through. item_name (str): Name of the item to find.	Item ID or None if not found.
read_tasks_from_csv	Reads tasks from a CSV file and returns a list of Task objects.	file_path (str): Path to the CSV file.	List of Task objects.
check_if_str	Checks if the given task_id is a string.	task_id (any): The task_id to check.	True if task_id is a string, otherwise False.

Chart functionality

This is based on that draw.io diagrams is in the XML format. This functionality chart_xml.py file. It creates XML file that you can open in draw.io. I recommend to use draw.io Visual Studio extension for this purpose. You can open the same *.drawio file with the Draw.io editor and as xml file and see the changes in real time.

Function Name	Description	Parameters	Returns
get_all_active_tasks	Retrieves all active tasks using the provided API key.	api_key (str): API key for authentication.	A list of active tasks or None if an error occurs.
get_all_sections	Gets all sections in a project.	api_key (str): API key for authentication. project_id (int): The ID of the project.	A list of Section items or None.
get_all_projects	Gets all projects.	api_key (str): API key for authentication.	A list of Project items or None if an error occurs.
find_item_id	Finds an item (e.g., project or section) by name and returns its ID.	items (list): A list of items to search through. item_name (str): The name of the item to find.	The ID of the found item, or None if not found.
find_item_name	Finds an item (e.g., project or section) by ID and returns its name.	items (list): A list of items to search through. item_id (int): The ID of the item to find.	The name of the found item, or None if not found.
add_task_to_xml	Adds a task to an XML file.	item_object (Chart): An object containing the task details, including task ID, content, coordinates, and style info.	None

Dependences:

• Python
• Poetry

How I use this project

I use this project to plan my studies in time block manner. You can read about time blocking here. First I integrated Todois with Google Calendar, so I can see my tasks in my calendar. See how to do it here. After adding tasks in Todoist, due date of each task will be on sunday in one time block. From there I drag and drop tasks to the right day in Todoist and then allocate specific time for the task in Google Calendar.