Idea

If I come across an article while browsing but do not have time to immediately read it, I want to create a task on Todoist (also see my Getting Things Done Framework setup in Todoist) to not forget about it. I also have a subscription to the TL;DR newsletter which gives a daily collection of summaries of interesting articles which I normally browse during the lunch break but do not have the time to read the actual articles.

I wanted to automate the process of creating the tasks using available free tools and came up with the following setup. I use Pocket to collect the articles, since it is well integrated into Firefox or can also be used as a "Share" sink on Android.

Make Setup

Make is an automation tool with a free tier that offers the functionality I need to automate this process. It has integrations for Todoist and Pocket, which made the setup process incredibly easy.

I created a simple scenario which has the following three steps:

Scheduled Pocket "Watch Items"

The first block is a Pocket "Watch Items" integration, which allows to read the items added to Pocket. You need to setup the connection to Pocket and can filter the items returned by state, in my case I only wanted the "Unread" items.

This integration is executed every day between 08:00 and 22:00 every 45 minutes by using a scheduler. This schedule keeps the number of executions just below the limit.

Todoist "Create a Task"

The list of items is then forwarded to the next step, the Todoist "Create a Task" integration. Again, the connection to your Todoist account needs to be set-up here.

Furthermore I use the "Resolved Title" as the name of the task, the "Resolved URL" and the "Time to Read" goes into the description of the task. Additionally I set one of the @5min, @15min or @30min labels to each article which helps me to select between short articles when I only have a little bit of time and a long read when I can set aside some more time.

Pocket "Modify Item Tags"

Finally, I set a "transferred" tag on the Pocket item, which helps me to see if the integration is still running or if things get left behind in my Pocket collection.

Conclusion

And that is all there is to it, a very simple way to create Todoist tasks automatically when I add things to Pocket.