RememberTheMilk to Todoist Migration

A utility to help migrate tasks from RememberTheMilk (RTM) to Todoist. It is built with the following assumptions:

• RTM Lists are Todoist Projects (or Sections)
• RTM Tags are Todoist Labels
• RTM Notes are Todoist Comments
• A task URL from RTM will be added to the description for a task in Todoist
• Handles nested subtasks (up to 3 levels)
• Migrating only active tasks from RTM (not completed or trashed tasks)
• Migrating to a Todoist with no tasks. If you already have tasks, you may want to add an extra tag so that you can tell the old from the imported tasks.
• Priorities are the following:
  • RTM No Priority = Todoist normal priority (API=1; UI=4)
  • RTM Priority 3 = Todoist Priority 3 (API=2; UI=3)
  • RTM Priority 2 = Todoist Priority 2 (API=3; UI=2)
  • RTM Priority 1 = Todoist Priority 1 (urgent) (API=4; UI=1)

Warning

• Does not handle recurrences well
  • This is mitigated by added the human readable recurrence text to the task name and adding a label of "fix-recurrance" to follow up on after import
• If a field isn't mentioned here, it is probably not handled in the migration.

Getting Started

Data from RTM can be derived from a json export or use the RTM API. I can't help you set up auth for RTM API because I did it years ago; however, there is decent documentation on the RTM API Documentation site.

Make sure you have python installed. This was tested with Python 3.12.

Copy .env.template to .env and fill in your crendentials. The RTM credentials aren't needed if you are using a json export.

Create a python virtual environment python3 -m venv .venv

Activate the environment source .venv/bin/activate

Install the python dependencies pip install -r requirements.txt

To get a list of project and sections from todoist, run Todoist().get_projects_and_sections() from the main() function of migrate.py

To get a list of lists from RTM API run RTM().get_all_lists()

In migrate.py, update the clists dict to reflect your list mapping. The keys are list_id strings from RTM and the values are tuples of (Todoist project_id, Todoist section_id). If the list doesn't map to a section, use zero.

Test a small data set

I recommend you start with a small sample of tasks to see if this will work well for you. You can call RTM().get_tasks() with a tag:tester filter and use a test project in Todoist.

Note: Subtasks will not be returned with this filter unless they themselves also have the "tester" tag.

Doing the full migration

To get tasks from an RTM Json export: tasks = RTM().get_tasks_from_export("/path/to/export.json")

To get tasks from the RTM API: tasks = RTM().get_tasks(filter="status:incomplete")

To import into Todoist: Todoist().add_tasks(tasks)

References

• Todoist REST API
• Remember The Milk API