I’ve always used the Mac contacts app to move/copy contacts between services. I’ve never used fastmail but had no problem moving data to/from Gmail, iCloud, and our company server (CommuniGate).
This may not be exactly a “duration” as you define it but in Things 3 I set a “when” date (start) and the due date. Things then shows me how many days remain until the project is due. This gives me a “duration”, which is one reason I like Things.
1 Like
I’m also using the Todoist/Fantastical combo with a specific “Time-Blocking” calendar. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to work those tasks into the calendar without a task duration, and I settled on duplicating the tasks as events. If you right click on a task you can duplicate it and turn it into a calendar event with whatever duration you like. I wish it would copy the task link or task info but it’s not the worst solution.
1 Like
Thanks, that is precisely my workaround as well. It still bothers me to then have duplicates (as events and tasks), but it sort of works. Not super-elegant, though 
Hey thanks, that’s a great suggestion. If you want to tag one of your staff, you don’t also have to add the Agenda parent tag too? I assume by assigning a child tag, then filtering for the parent tag will capture all of those?
It doesn’t actually fit my needs exactly, but it’s good to know for the future!
I tried Sorted3 as well for exactly the same reason. It’s one thing to have “finish report” as a task, but it takes it to another level when I assign it 30 minutes, 60 minutes or 2 hours. I really liked the idea of giving tasks durations, sorting them by priority and having the app add them as effectively calendar events around all my other appointments. For me, the interface just didn’t feel as clean as either Fantastical or Things, which are the two apps I’m using together. But I’m very much keeping my eye on Sorted!
1 Like
That’s precisely what happens. Parent tag will contemplate every child when filtering. Even if the parent tag hasn’t been explicitly set for the item.
I also have a communications tag that will have tel and email. If I filter for communications it will show every item tagged either with tel or email. No need to assign them the parent task.
There are a small number of related services/apps, but not many. Amazing Marvin, Skedpal, Butleroy, and…?
Still not really ready for me to completely embrace them, though.
For contacts, groups and some custom fields didn’t come over. I tried 4 or 5 different methods, from google export, Apple Contacts , export to vcf , Fastmail importer
service, none of them were perfect.
But I’ve migrated most of the data and recreated groups manually. I’m keeping Google contacts around for reference for custom field names.
The largest challenge for email was google’s “all mail” which contained both my archived emails and filed email. You can do a custom email search to mostly return only the emails without tags, which were my “archive” emails, but it wasn’t easy. I put the search results into a folder called “Archived” and moved it into Fastmail.
I learned my lesson to not use a global archive folder, but rather have a unique folder for each category of email. It was easy to just press the Archive button when processing email, but it can create a mess later on.
1 Like
Using Lots of Calendars & Contact Groups
Like David, I have a ton of calendars and contact groups as well. My calendars are color-coded: blues are work-related, pinks and purples are personal. During normal times, this lets me quickly see when I’ll be out, versus at home/in the office.
I also put all the meetings that I have to travel to on their own calendar, which makes it easy to automatically create a mileage-tracking spreadsheet. This is not as helpful right now, since Google’s features mean all events I’m invited to show up in my Meetings calendar. Still, this gives me fewer items to go through in my mileage spreadsheet.
Tasks & Their Intersection With Events
I use Google Calendars and Toodist. I have a Zap in Zapier that watches certain calendars and, when I enter a new event into one of them, adds that event to Todoist, in a special task list called “Google calendar."
This lets me use Todoist for planning ahead: If I see that I have events taking up time on certain days, then I know I have to plan tasks around those. I’ve also, on occasion, used Todoist’s Project Calendar feed to have tasks assigned to dates show up in my calendar app as a read-only calendar.
Tasks and Start Dates/Duration
I deal with the concept of “start dates” in Todoist by including the due date in parentheses in the task name, and assigning the task to the date when I want to start it. This does require hitting the Delete key once in Todoist so it doesn’t use the due date as the assigned date, but it’s no big deal.
Then, I either:have the task repeat every day until the due date (if I want to see it on that day’s task list in advance, for planning), or I simply click into the task and change the due date to the next day I want to work on it (super-easy because of Todoist’s natural-language recognition).
1 Like
Attaching Stuff to Todoist Tasks - with Hook
This will work in any task manager, I believe.
Todoist offers two ways to attach files to tasks: you can fully attach a copy of a file from your computer, or you can attach a link to the web location of a file from Dropbox of another cloud service. Neither is ideal in most circumstances. I don’t usually want to copy a file into Todoist. But the cloud service attachment requires navigating a whole bunch of tiny hierarchical menus to get to my document.
Instead, I’ve started using Hook links to attach documents – and even folders – from my computer (including synced cloud services) to Todoist tasks. Hook has been discussed a few times on MPU – it’s a little Mac app that lets you copy links to lots of different things and then attach those links to other things. In this case, I just select the file, invoke Hook with a keyboard shortcut, press Command+C, and then press Command+V to paste a link to the file into a task name or a comment. This is much faster than navigating my cloud storage from within Todoist, and doesn’t make a copy of the file. Hook is also pretty good about resolving links even if you move a file.
I also use Hook to attach all kinds of other things to Todoist tasks: emails, links to contacts in the Contacts app, a link to an Evernote note or a Draft, etc. In general, this has made Todoist much more robust for me.
Most of the time, if I’m sharing a task list and want the other person to have access to the file, I have to use Todoist’s built-in file attaching. BUT, if the other person has a Mac and the free version of Hook and we’re sharing a cloud folder, I can attach a Hook link to anything in that folder and they can click the link to go to it.
DISCLOSURE: After I started using Hook in Todoist, the developer and I connected, and I’m now doing some writing for the company.
1 Like