Hello,
I use the adding text feature to add @ or a # to the title of my draft, which allowed me, once send to Todoist, to directly organize the task into the correct project with the right labels.
However, no matter how much I add the text “for 10 minutes” at the end of the title of my draft, it is not taken into account once the draft is sent to Todoist.
Has anyone found a way to make this work?
Thank you in advance!
Does that work in Todoist? It doesn’t look to me like their quick add syntax supports parsing durations from natural language, and I was not able to get it to recognize “for 10 minutes” or similar in Todoist itself when using quick add.
I think this would be possible with actions that created tasks with a different API, but you would also lose all the other quick add parsing of projects, tags, etc.
For 10 mins does work in quick add but has to be in combination with a due date. It can’t be applied in isolation.
Edit - Note task durations were only added quite recently in Todoist.
Yes, it works with natural language input… It’s even more surprising that it doesn’t work through sending a Draft, but it works perfectly fine directly from the inbox.
Could you provide an example phrase that works? I’m trying a few things like “My task 10am for 10 minutes” and variants of that on the Todoist website and it never parses the duration.
For me, in French, I can write:
« appeler Paul demain à 10h pendant 10 minutes »
The English translation should be:
« Call Paul tomorrow at 10:00 for 10 minutes ».
You can find some exemples here:
Works OK for me as per screen grab…
Just had a thought. Durations is Pro-only so not available on the free account.
Yes, you are right. As for me, I have the pro subscription, but maybe the other people who are testing it are not?
I’ll try to do some more testing later, but I would suggest opening a ticket with Todoist asking if their API supports this feature. If it’s a new feature, it’s not uncommon for them to have not updated the APIs to support it, even though they’ve rolled it out elsewhere.
In the meantime, if it works in app, you could use an action that sends text to the Todoist app instead of directly to the API. (Example action).
Seems to be in the REST API
That’s what I meant above about using other APIs, but losing the quick add parsing features.
Not sure to understand everything 
An API (Application Programming Interface) is a way that let’s one computer program/app/system talk to another. They have what are known as end points. They are options to do different things.
One end point for Todoist uses a single entry for a quick entry. Another one gives you lots of specific ways to forego the natural language and specify each bit of data.
It sounds like the quick entry end point may not yet have been updated with the latest natural language processing. So while you can set it via the app in quick entry and via the detailed API entry point, this could explain why the quick entry API end point does not support the duration… yet.
A very big thank you for the explanations! Hoping that this will be implemented soon!