Todoist: Workflow actions & triggers

Todoist Overview

Todoist is a task-management platform that helps teams and individuals organise work into projects, sections, and tasks. It offers features such as labels, priorities, due dates, deadlines, comments, and collaboration. The Todoist integration enables these capabilities within the Workflow Builder, allowing task-lifecycle activities to trigger customer-facing automations. You can manage Todoist tasks and projects seamlessly, without leaving the builder.

Integration Components

• Triggers (Todoist → Workflows): Three polling triggers — New incomplete task, New completed task, and New project — which poll every 5 minutes.
• Actions (Workflows → Todoist): Twelve actions covering the task lifecycle (create, update, mark complete), comments on tasks and projects, project creation, section moves, task discovery (find tasks, find projects, find users), and collaborator management (get collaborators, invite users).

All triggers and actions are marked as premium workflow components, and premium action credits will apply at the standard automation rate. Usage of Todoist plans (projects, tasks, collaborators, integrations) is billed directly to your Todoist account.

Before you can run any Todoist trigger or action, the integration needs to be connected via OAuth.

• Connect via the Workflow Builder (recommended):
• Open Automation → Workflows and select (or create) a workflow.
• Add a Todoist trigger or action by searching for Todoist in the Apps tab.
• Select any Todoist trigger or action.
• On the panel, click Connect your account.
• You will be redirected to Todoist’s OAuth authorisation screen. Approve the requested scopes.
• You will then return to the Workflow Builder, and the panel will update to show ‘Connected’.

Connect via Settings (alternative path):

• Go to Settings → Integrations.
• Locate Todoist and click Connect.
• Complete the OAuth flow.

This walkthrough demonstrates how to set up a workflow that triggers every time a new task is created in a specific Todoist project. The same setup applies to New completed task and New project, with the only changes being the trigger selection and applicable filters.

Step 1: Add the Trigger

• Open the workflow and click Add trigger.
• Switch to the Apps tab and search for Todoist.
• Select New incomplete task.

Step 2: Configure the Trigger

• Connected Account: Select the Todoist account this trigger will monitor.
• Workflow Trigger Name: Provide a meaningful label, e.g., ‘New Support Task’.
• Filters → Project: Choose a project to scope to (helper text reads ‘Only trigger for tasks in this project’). Leave empty to trigger for tasks in any project.
• Add Filters (optional): Add additional conditions (label, priority, due-date range).

Step 3: Test the Trigger

• Click Find new records inside the Test your trigger panel.
• If no matching records appear, add a task to the target Todoist project and wait one polling cycle (5 minutes), then re-fetch.
• Select the returned record as the mapping reference.
• Click Save trigger.

This walkthrough illustrates how to create a Todoist task from a workflow event — the most common outbound-to-Todoist pattern.

Step 1: Add the Action

• Inside the workflow, click Add to insert a new step.
• Open the Apps tab and select Todoist.
• Choose Create task from the action list.

Step 2: Configure the Action

• Connected Account: Choose the Todoist account where the task will be created.
• Action Name: e.g., ‘Create Task from Form Submission’.
• Project: Select from the dropdown. Defaults to Inbox if not specified. Use Find projects upstream to resolve the project ID from a name if it is unknown at build time.
• Title (required): The task title. Keep it concise for clear rendering in Todoist’s task lists.
• Note: A detailed description for the task, if the title alone lacks context.
• Due Date (Human Formatted) OR Due Date (Raw Formatted): Choose one, not both. Refer to ‘Working with Due Dates and Deadlines’ above.
• Deadline Date (optional): Hard deadline in YYYY-MM-DD format. Todoist deadlines do not support a time component.

Step 3: Test the Action

• Click Test action.
• Confirm — this creates a real task in Todoist. Use a clearly-marked title (‘TEST — DELETE’) if testing against a production project.
• Save the action and run a full Test workflow before publishing.

Always test before publishing. Testing locks the payload schema and provides downstream steps with a real record to map against.

• In the trigger panel, click Find new records.
• If no matching records appear, create or complete a task in Todoist (or create a project) and wait one polling cycle (5 minutes), then re-fetch.
• Select the returned record as the mapping reference.

• In the action panel, click Test action.
• The action runs against the live Todoist account — real tasks, comments, or projects are created.
• Verify in Todoist and clean up test records afterwards.

Use Case 1: Form Submission → Todoist Task in the Right Project

Goal: Route inbound requests into Todoist as tasks with the appropriate project, labels, and priority.

Workflow Setup:

• Trigger: Form submission
• Optional: Branch on form input to determine the correct project or priority
• Action: Find projects (resolve the target project ID by name)
• Action: Create task (title from form, note with the full submission body, priority based on urgency, labels for team routing)

Example: A customer submits a support request marked ‘urgent’. The workflow finds the ‘Support Backlog’ project and creates a P1 task with the full request as the note, labelled ‘external-report’ — the support lead sees it in Todoist within seconds without leaving their task list.

Use Case 2: Task Completed → Close the Loop in the Platform

Goal: Take action when a Todoist task is marked complete.

Workflow Setup:

• Trigger: New completed task (filter by project)
• Action: Match the task back to the originating CRM contact (via a stored task ID or a label containing the contact reference)
• Action: Update contact / send notification / advance a stage

Example: A ‘Follow up with Acme’ task is marked complete in the AE’s Todoist. Within 5 minutes, the CRM contact’s custom field is updated (‘last touched: today’), and the deal stage is advanced — Todoist remains the AE’s working list, and the CRM records are updated seamlessly.

Use Case 3: Team Task with Due Date and Label

Goal: Create a task on a shared project with the proper metadata for routing and reporting.

Workflow Setup:

• Trigger: Any operational event needing follow-up
• Action: Create task (Project = shared team project, Priority = P2, Labels = ‘needs-review’)
• Action: Add comment to task (context / links / instructions)

Example: A signup-abandonment automation generates a task in the CS team’s Todoist project with a note linking to the abandoned session, priority set to P2, and labelled ‘needs-review’ — a CS agent picks it up as part of their regular workflow.