Introducing: Task Durations 🆕

[Omar Samuels]

Hi,

 

📢 This is a heads-up for our community of developers and integrators.

 

In the upcoming weeks, we will begin to roll out our new task duration features to users.

 

Task Duration helps people plan their daily work by setting a task's start time and duration.  It has been one of the features most highly requested by our users and can unlock some excellent opportunities for integrations that would benefit from the tracking and display of tasks within the context of a defined time slot (such as a calendar interface and time-blocking).

The duration feature will be available for paid users only.

 

The feature can be accessed via Quick Add using the "for" identifier (e.g. Aerobic workout at 8am for 45min).  It can also be used in-app via user interface components (think date scheduler) and will of course be integrations-friendly (e.g. API support, Google Calendar two-way sync, IFTTT trigger, inclusion in backups, exports, and calendar feeds).

 

Some important limitations to note are that

• parsing for duration does not currently support hyphens or "to" as identifiers (e.g. 4pm-4:45pm or 8am to 9am),

• durations cannot be added to tasks without a due date/time already selected for the task,

• while the API will support them, official apps will not support durations longer than 24 hours and will treat such cases as tasks without duration.

 

The new properties and objects are already available for exploration and are outlined in our API documentation.

 

Essentially, task duration is handled by two new fields, nested under the "duration" object:

 

"duration": {

    "amount": 15,

    "unit": "minute"

}

 

As outlined in the documentation, the amount field must be an integer greater than zero. unit can be either minute or day. Those fields are available in all the usual endpoints to read, create and update an item, both on the Sync and REST APIs.

 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at  https://todoist.com/contact and let us know.

Thank you for your support as we continue to extend Todoist and its functionality.🙏