Todoist + deariary: see what you actually accomplished

#integration #guide

You finished twelve tasks today. You know this because Todoist says so: twelve checkmarks, twelve satisfying taps, twelve items moved from “to do” to “done.”

Tomorrow you will not remember a single one of them.

That is the strange thing about task completion. The moment you check something off, it disappears. Not from Todoist (the completed list is still there if you go looking), but from your memory. The act of finishing dissolves the task. You carry a vague sense of “I got a lot done today” or “today felt unproductive,” but the specifics vanish fast.

deariary catches those tasks before they fade. It reads your completed items from Todoist and weaves them into your diary entry alongside everything else that happened that day. The checkmarks become a record of what you actually accomplished, not just a counter that resets every morning.

What a completed task forgets

Todoist is excellent at capturing what needs to be done. It is less useful as a record of what you did. Once a task is checked off, it joins a long, flat list of completed items with no narrative, no grouping, no connection to the rest of your day.

Here is what fades even though the completed task still exists somewhere in Todoist:

The effort behind the task. “Research API options” might have taken fifteen minutes of browsing or four hours of reading documentation and writing comparison notes. The checkmark is the same either way.
The order and rhythm. You knocked out five small tasks before lunch, then spent the entire afternoon on one large one. That rhythm tells you something about how your day felt. The completed list does not preserve it.
What prompted the task. You added “call dentist” after waking up with a toothache. You added “update resume” after a tough meeting. The tasks outlive their context. Three months later, the completed list says you called a dentist. It does not say why.
The satisfaction (or lack of it). Some days you complete ten tasks and feel like you accomplished nothing important. Other days you complete two and feel like you moved a mountain. The count does not capture the difference.

A diary does. It turns a list of checkmarks into a paragraph about your day, and that paragraph carries something a task list never can: the shape of how your time was spent.

What deariary collects from Todoist

When you connect Todoist, deariary reads your completed tasks from the previous day through Todoist’s REST API using OAuth. The only permission it requests is data:read (read-only access). It collects:

Task content: the name of each completed task
Description: the task description, if one exists (many tasks have none)
Completion time: when you checked it off
Added time: when the task was originally created, so the diary can note tasks that sat on your list for weeks versus ones you added and finished the same day
Project: which Todoist project the task belonged to
Section: which section within the project, if the task was organized into one
Labels: any labels you assigned to the task
Priority: the priority level (urgent, high, medium, or normal)
Parent relationship: whether the task is a subtask of another completed item

deariary uses this information as context for your diary entry. The LLM sees that your morning was spent on urgent work tasks from a “Sprint 12” project, your afternoon had a cluster of personal errands labeled “home,” and you finished the day by completing a low-priority task in your “Reading List” project. That grouping helps it describe the flow of your day, not just list what got done.

What deariary does NOT collect

No pending or active tasks. deariary only sees tasks you completed. Your to-do list, upcoming deadlines, and overdue items remain private.
No task comments. Comments and discussion threads on tasks are not read.
No due dates. The original due date of a task is not collected, only when it was added and completed.
No collaborator information. If you share projects with others, deariary does not see their tasks or names.
No filters or board views. Your Todoist layout and saved filters are not accessed.
No karma or goal tracking. Todoist’s productivity scores and daily goals are not collected.
No ability to create, edit, or delete tasks. deariary only reads completed items. It cannot modify your Todoist in any way.

You can revoke access at any time from Todoist’s integration settings. Once revoked, deariary loses access immediately.

From checkmarks to a readable day

Here is where the difference becomes clear. Say you had a day where you completed tasks across three projects: a few work items, some personal errands, and a reading goal.

In Todoist, that is a completed-tasks list sorted by time. Useful for auditing. Not useful for remembering.

deariary reads those completed tasks and writes something like:

Your morning focused on the product launch: you finalized the press release, reviewed the landing page copy, and sent the launch checklist to the team. After lunch you shifted gears, picking up dry cleaning and dropping off a package at the post office. In the evening you finished the chapter on habit formation that you had been reading all week.

One paragraph. The tasks are there, but they are woven into a story about how your day unfolded. Work, errands, personal time: the diary shows the balance (or imbalance) of your day in a way that a task list never can.

Completed tasks as the measure of your day

Todoist is unique among deariary’s integrations because it captures intentional action. Google Calendar shows where you were scheduled to be. Slack shows what you discussed. GitHub shows what you coded. But Todoist shows what you decided to do and then actually did.

That distinction matters for a diary. Completed tasks are a record of agency: you chose these things, you followed through, you checked them off. When you read your diary back three months later, seeing “you finished preparing the presentation, organized next week’s meals, and finally booked that flight” tells you something about who you were that day. Not just what happened to you, but what you made happen.

Over time, patterns emerge. You might notice that your most satisfying diary entries are the ones where you completed a mix of deep work and small personal tasks. Or that weeks with lots of completed tasks do not always feel productive in the diary, because they were all shallow busywork. The diary gives you a lens that the task count alone cannot provide.

Todoist alone vs. with other integrations

A Todoist-only diary gives you a record of what you accomplished. That is valuable on its own. But it reads like an annotated to-do list.

Add other integrations and the entries come alive:

Todoist only:

You completed 8 tasks today: finalized the quarterly report, replied to vendor emails, scheduled a team offsite, picked up groceries, reviewed the budget proposal, updated the project timeline, called the insurance company, and finished reading chapter 5.

Todoist + Google Calendar + Slack:

Your morning started with a team standup, after which you spent a focused hour finalizing the quarterly report. Between meetings you knocked out a few quick items: replying to vendor emails and scheduling the team offsite for next month. The afternoon was quieter. You reviewed the budget proposal that Kenji had shared in the finance channel, and updated the project timeline based on the discussion from your 2pm planning session. On the way home you picked up groceries, and after dinner you finished the chapter on behavioral economics you had been reading all week.

The first entry is a list. The second is a day.

On the Free plan you can connect one integration, which is enough to try Todoist on its own. Upgrading to Basic (up to 5 integrations) lets you combine your completed tasks with the rest of your day. See pricing on deariary.com for details.

When you complete nothing

Some days your Todoist stays untouched. No tasks checked off. Maybe you were in back-to-back meetings. Maybe you spent the day reading, thinking, or resting. Maybe you just did not use Todoist that day.

On those days, deariary has no Todoist data to work with. If other integrations are connected, they pick up the slack. A day with no completed tasks but a full calendar and active Slack conversations still produces a rich diary. If Todoist is your only integration, the entry will be short.

That is fine. A day with no checkmarks tells you something too. When you look back over a month of diary entries, the days where nothing was “accomplished” in the task sense often turn out to be the days you remember most fondly: a long walk, an unexpected conversation, a lazy Sunday. The absence of tasks is its own kind of entry.

Setting it up

Connecting Todoist to deariary takes about 30 seconds:

Go to app.deariary.com
Open Settings and find the Integrations section
Click Todoist and authorize with your Todoist account

That is it. No API tokens, no webhook URLs, no configuration. deariary connects through Todoist’s official OAuth flow, which means you can see exactly what permissions are being granted and revoke them at any time.

The next morning, your diary will include your completed tasks from the previous day.

What surprised us

We have been running deariary with Todoist connected since the early prototype. Here is what we noticed.

The gap between “productive” and “fulfilling” becomes visible. Some days you complete fifteen tasks and the diary reads like a treadmill: lots of motion, not much meaning. Other days you complete three tasks and the diary reads like a turning point. The diary surfaces this difference in a way that Todoist’s completion count never can.

Personal tasks make the best diary entries. Work tasks tend to be functional: “review PR,” “send invoice,” “update docs.” They produce useful diary entries, but they do not surprise you when you re-read them. Personal tasks are different. “Book flights to Okinawa,” “buy birthday present for mom,” “sign up for pottery class.” These are the tasks that, six months later, unlock a whole cascade of memories. The trip, the birthday dinner, the first wobbly bowl you made.

The mix of task types tells the story. A day that is all work tasks reads differently from a day split between work, errands, and personal projects. The diary shows you the balance of your life across categories without you having to track it intentionally. You are already organizing tasks into projects in Todoist. deariary turns that organization into a narrative about how you divide your time.

Your Todoist already records what you get done. deariary turns those completed tasks into a diary that shows not just what you accomplished, but what kind of day it was. The checkmarks become context, the projects become chapters, and the day becomes something worth reading back.

Connect Todoist to deariary