How To Use Todoist to Track Emails, Notes, and Tasks From Other Apps

If you’re looking to be more productive, keeping task management software is a great place to start. And among the many to-do list apps in the market right now, Todoist continues to be the number one choice for various reasons—from smart language recognition to cross-platform support. Still, it might not cover all parts of your daily workflow.

So, if you’re wondering how to use Todoist to its full potential, you’re going to need some help from third-party integrations. While your to-do list is the primary source of your tasks, it’s likely not the only one. Some of them might come from emails, meeting notes, or collaboration tools—not to mention the multiple accounts you might have in each of these services to separate work from personal stuff.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have Todoist as a central repository for everything you need to do every day? By integrating Todoist with all the other apps where your tasks live, you’ll always know what to do next without losing so much time manually tracking your work in different places. In this article, we’ll show you how to achieve this using an integration tool called Pleexy.

Todoist Automation with Pleexy

Pleexy isn’t like your average integration tool. Apps like Zapier and IFTTT are great for automating almost any kind of manual process in a company or your own workflow. However, there’s just one caveat: there is no two-way sync of your data by default.

Say you want to create a Todoist task for each new Asana task assigned to you. In Zapier or IFTTT, you can set this up by crafting an if-then recipe. The problem is that the new task created in Todoist is merely a duplicate of the original task in Asana. If you change anything in Todoist, it won’t be copied over to Asana which means double work for you. To create a two-way Todoist and Asana integration, you’d have to set up several if-then recipes to create a realistic workflow and repeat the same process to cover the other direction of the sync.

Because Pleexy was built to integrate task management apps in particular, every integration links your tasks bi-directionally by default. The new task in Todoist is treated as one and the same as what’s in Asana. If you complete it in Todoist, it’s also completed on the other end.

Currently, you can use Pleexy to connect Todoist with Outlook, Evernote, ClickUp, Trello, Monday.com, Zendesk, and more. This way, you can keep track of all your action items from various sources right inside Todoist. The best part is you don’t have to manually think of several if-then scenarios to enable the sync.

To start, create an account at Pleexy and choose Todoist as your task manager. Click “Create a connection” and select a source service. Let’s go over some of the integrations you can build in more detail.

Convert Emails Into Tasks

If you use your email inbox as a to-do list, chances are you’ll forget some of your tasks as they get buried among other messages. Sending actionable emails to your dedicated task manager is a better way to follow through on them.

With Pleexy, you can create Todoist tasks from flagged messages in Outlook with one click. Start by connecting Todoist with your Outlook account. Next, choose which folders Pleexy should scan for any flagged emails whether that’s your inbox, all folders, or custom ones. Enter a certain date range to narrow down the search to your most recent emails.

The next step is to define where you can see all your emails in Todoist. This lets you control how these auto-channelled tasks fit into your current Todoist setup. Here, you have two options:

• Create all tasks in one Todoist project
• Create separate Todoist projects for each Outlook folder

If you choose the second option, you can select the parent project under which your Outlook folders will appear in Todoist. For an added layer of organization, you can even create sections within a project and name them based on the sender or your folders in Outlook.

An integration isn’t complete if you can’t see all the information you need where you’re working from. The Tasks Template lets you choose what kind of details you can copy from Outlook to Todoist. You can add the email body, priority, and due date.

Lastly, you can control what happens on either side when you complete or delete a task or email. As you can see, setting up a connection doesn’t require any developer help. Just customize the flow of information how you need it through easy drop-down menus.

Take Action on Your Notes

Note-taking apps usually have a wide range of features for capturing and organizing important information. However, when it comes to tracking action items from your notes, they might not be the best option simply because that’s not what they were designed to do.

One simple workaround is to send your notes—or to-do items from your notes— to your task manager. Pleexy lets you connect Todoist with two of the most popular note-taking apps, Evernote and OneNote.

All of the integrations in Pleexy let you customize four main settings as we discussed earlier, but the specific options vary depending on what’s available in the source application. With the Todoist Evernote integration, you can choose which notes to sync by filtering them based on tags, notebooks, or Evernote’s advanced search conditions.

To easily identify any notes that will be carried over to Todoist, you can create a temporary “Pleexy” tag in Evernote and apply it to all of your notes that contain some kind of next steps you should take action on. When you’re configuring your Source settings in Pleexy, just select the temporary tag for Pleexy to pick up these notes. If you’d rather keep your task list clean, you can always remove the label once the tasks have been created in Todoist.

Of course, everyone has their own way of taking notes; some people create one note for each task while others have to-do items under each note. Pleexy lets you choose which of the two items from Evernote will be made into Todoist tasks. If you choose the latter, you can group your tasks so that each note will become a parent task in Todoist while its subtasks correspond to the to-do items in Evernote.

Now that you’ve got your notes in Todoist, you can utilize each tool for its strengths, with Todoist as your task tracker and Evernote as your planner. Every task created by Pleexy in Todoist will appear as a hyperlink which leads you back to the original note in Evernote. You don’t have to manually copy and paste your information or toggle back and forth between platforms to understand what you need to do. The link will make it easier to pull up additional context while you’re working.

The Task Template lets you control how your tasks will be named in Todoist based on the given fields: to-do, note, and notebook. To keep your labels synced between Todoist and Evernote, just enable the option and choose the direction of the sync. Just like our other integrations, you can decide to sync certain actions between the two apps or not.

Stay in the Loop on Team Projects

When it comes to managing short-term day-to-day tasks, Todoist has all the features you need. Tracking large collaborative projects, however, will be easier through work management software. If, for example, you use Todoist for your personal tasks but your company uses ClickUp, you can always use Pleexy to bridge your work between both tools.

Pleexy’s Source settings for project management apps allow very granular control over which tasks you’d like to send to Todoist. For the ClickUp-Todoist integration, you can filter your tasks by Workspaces, Spaces, Folders, Lists, Statuses, and the number of days since they were updated.

Project management apps can be full of information that may be critical but not exactly important for your own personal workflow. To avoid getting distracted by other tasks your team is working on, choose the “Assigned to Me” filter and get a more focused overview of what matters to you. If the assignee changes, the task will disappear from your to-do list so you don’t have to keep thinking about it.

The last part of the Source settings lets you choose how Pleexy tracks completed tasks. Simply choose which ClickUp statuses will be used to mark tasks as done. When you complete a task in Todoist, the corresponding task in ClickUp will be moved to the designated “complete” status.

As with the email and notes integrations, you can customize the title of your tasks in Todoist only this time, you have more template fields to choose from: task, parent task, status, list, folder, space, workspace, and assignee.

To add any additional details, enable due dates, labels, description, and priority. You can sync due dates and labels both ways, or if you don’t want to touch anything in either app when something’s changed on the other side, choose a one-way sync instead. Pleexy also carries over any subtasks from your collaboration tools.

As previously shown, all tasks can be placed in one Todoist project or several ones according to your lists in ClickUp. Just choose the root Todoist project to use and create them in sections if you want to maintain the same level of organization for your task groups.

If you’ve enabled tracking of task completeness, you can choose what happens on either side when you complete a task, whether you want to copy the same action on the other end or leave the task as it is. You can also choose to automatically delete tasks in Todoist if they’re deleted in ClickUp.

With this setup in place, you’re free to manage everything you’re responsible for right inside your personal task manager while keeping everything in sync. You can quickly start your day with a big-picture view of your work along with your personal obligations in one place, making it easier to identify which ones are top priority.

With so many aspects of life to manage, and so many choices in apps, how do we choose the right app for the right situation? Let me help, check out my Productivity Guide Task vs. Project Management: Which do you need?

Manage Support Tickets With Todoist

If your work involves any form of customer support, you’re probably familiar with Zendesk, a CRM tool that lets you keep track of customer concerns across multiple channels through a ticketing system. In Pleexy, you can set up a two-way connection between your Zendesk tickets and Todoist.

To start, define the criteria for tickets that will be brought to Todoist based on Organization, Ticket Type, Assignee, and Status. There’s also the Advanced Mode for expert Zendesk users who want to use pre-defined Zendesk views. In the Destination settings, choose the Todoist project where your tickets will automatically populate.

You can easily prioritize your tickets by adding a due date and priority level based on what was set up in Zendesk. Similar to our other connectors, you decide what happens when tasks or tickets are completed and deleted on either side. If you need help from other team members to resolve a ticket, invite them to collaborate on the Todoist task. Now you can track your support tickets more efficiently using Todoist’s task management features, all while keeping your customers satisfied.

Connecting Multiple Accounts

By now you know how easy it is to integrate Todoist with other apps using Pleexy. After the initial configuration, all your notes, emails, and tasks will be automatically created as Todoist tasks. There’s no need to manually add important details every time you want to add something to Todoist.

Now, what if you have multiple accounts in some of the source apps you’ve connected? Easy. Just create another connection in Pleexy, select your desired account, and go through the same four steps. You can add as many accounts as you want to cover all your workspaces. You can also create multiple connections for one account if you want to have different sync rules for different projects.
 

Customize Your Workflow

Emails, notes, support tickets, and collaborative projects are just some of the things you can link with your personal task management software. If you want to go beyond and don’t mind setting up custom automation rules, that’s where tools like Zapier, IFTTT, and Automate.io come in handy.

With these solutions, you can create a new Todoist task every time you have a new client in Pipedrive, track your progress by adding completed Todoist tasks to a Google spreadsheet, and so much more. IFTTT even allows you to create your own automations if you don’t find any pre-built ones that suit your needs.

Not a fan of third-party tools? Don’t worry, Todoist has a ton of direct integrations for various categories like file sharing, team communication, time tracking, and calendar management.

Be More Productive With Automation

Todoist is fantastic at what it does—help you organize work and life and accomplish your goals. By incorporating a little automation into your workflow, you can introduce new capabilities in your favorite to-do app to make it even more powerful.

Ready to automate your task management in Todoist? Paperless Movement members can sign up for Pleexy and get 40% off one year of Premium.