My Hack for Importing My Toodledo Hotlist into Trello

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you the hack that I use to “import” my Toodledo hotlist into Trello.

Toodledo is my main task management system.  It’s essentially a tickler system that reminds me of things that I have to do daily, weekly, every four months or at a specific date in the future. Every day, I wake up to anywhere from 9 to 30 tasks that I should get done today.  Toodledo is fantastic as a reminder system, but when it comes to making a plan to get through a list of 30 tasks — it’s not great.  It won’t let me manually sort the items in my hotlist into the order that I want to do them and the workarounds for this are too time consuming. As a result, if I have more than 10 tasks in my hotlist for the day, I either use Notability to create an image based agenda (you can see my video on that) OR I import everything into Trello.

Trello is a really versatile task and project management system.  I have a couple of videos giving an overview of Trello and an accounting of how I use it in my life.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a robust enough recurring task function for me to switch over to it entirely, but I really like working with it for my daily task list and for other projects.  So, here is my daily task list Trello board.  Here are my tasks for the day, which I can sort manually by dragging and dropping.  I can move some tasks over to the Later list and when I’m done with something, I drag it to the Done list to the left.  It helps me to create a plan to tackle my chores for the day.  But here is the question I faced — how was I going to get all 30 tasks from Toodledo into Trello without having to retype them?  I tried a bunch of things, but here is the hack that works best for me.

In brief, I take a photo of my tasks, use a character recognition app to convert the photo to text, and then use the add multiple cards function in Trello to add each line as a new card.  Let’s go through it step by step.

Take a photo

First of all, I do all of this on my iPhone or iPad because I always have one of these with me and I like iPhone OCR app better than options on my PC.  First, I go into the Safari browser and log into Toodledo.  You can see my hotlist for the day comes right up.  Why don’t I go to the Toodledo app instead?  After all, that is how I interact with Toodledo most of the time.  The reason is that I want each task on a separate line without extraneous text that I will need to delete.   The Toodledo app has a second line below each task that shows task length and goal.  Having to delete all of this extra information will end up making more work for me, so I use the cleaner browser view instead.  Okay — I zoom in and take a screenshot of my task list.  Then I crop it so that only the tasks are showing.  Now I’m going to

Convert photo to text

If I hit the Share button up here, I can open this photo in TextGrabber, which is my favorite optical character recognition, or OCR app.  Hitting the arrow up here converts this image to text.  TextGrabber is fantastic, but sometimes it takes out line breaks, so I go through the text making sure that each task is on its own line. Multiple line breaks are fine.  Okay this looks great.  Now I’m going to hit this copy icon. In the iPhone version I have hit the Share button to get to the Copy option.  Okay — now I’m ready to

Create Multiple Cards in Trello

Trello has a great feature that allows you to create multiple cards if each card is on its own line.  Unfortunately, this does not work in its otherwise fantastic mobile app.  SO, we are back to using Safari.  Go back into Safari and this time go to Trello’s webpage. Obviously you should have bookmarks to both of these websites. I’m going to open my Today’s Tasks board and start a new card. Then I’m going to paste all of the tasks that I copied to the clipboard. Once I hit Create, Trello asks if I want to create multiple cards — I hit that option and voila!  All of my tasks are copied to individual cards and I’m ready to drag and drop them into whatever order I want to work through my day.  I will say that dragging and dropping is not as easy in the mobile web version as it is on the app, so I usually switch right back to the app to start organizing my tasks.

This whole process takes me literally less than a minute and helps my productivity by allowing me to sort manually, add information, and move my tasks around. Sometimes, I’ll even create lists for Morning, Afternoon, and Evening to turn this board into more of an agenda.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.