Automatically Sending Tasks in Bear Notes to Todoist

There were two notable things I did this weekend: spend it with my kids, as it was my wife’s weekend to work (she’s a nurse and must work one weekend per month), and build a series of clever automations using Apple’s Shortcuts app.

I love using the Bear Notes app for most things, like quickly logging tasks. This includes my 5 Critical Actions for the week, and any open threads I have at the end of the day*.

But Todoist is my main task manager, with reminders, subtasks, and the whole 9 yards.

So I ended up building 3 Shortcuts to send tasks from Bear to Todoist:

1. Process tasks specifically in the 5 Critical Actions note. I did this so I can properly label the tasks as such…Todoist doesn’t let you create create labels on the fly.
2. Process any note via the Share Sheet
3. Process every note, looking for tasks in all of them, and creating the tasks plus a link back to the original note for context.

I’ll share the first one with you here…the other two are reserved for members.

Here are the Steps:

1. Get the contents of the 5 Critical Actions note (you can replace this with the title of any note).
2. Split the note’s contents by new line.
3. For each line in the note, do the following:
   1. Look for the characters - [ ] at the beginning. Bear converts this into a tick box in app, representing a task.
   2. If it exists, remove it, leaving only the task itself.
   3. Add the task to Todoist, with the label 5-Critial-Action

That’s it! I’m using Text Case to actually format the text to remove the
 - [ ]. That is a free, tip-supported app.

How it Works

Get contents is a built-in Bear action, but you likely do this with any notes app. Apple Notes, for instances, returns the contents of a note when you search.

Split allows you to break up the contents by some delimiter (or marker). In my case, I did it by new line, but you could do it by any character. This allows me to look at each line individually.

Since I only want to add tasks, I search for the characters I mentioned. This prevents contextual text or footnotes from getting added to Todoist.

Todoist’s (iOS-only) shortcuts allow you to set a label, priority, and more, allowing me to use a label specific to the note:

Unfortunately, Todoist doesn’t let you create labels on the fly.

No Improvements

This is one of the rare automations I built that I don’t feel needs any improvements — but that’s mostly because it’s limited in scope to one note.

As I mentioned earlier, I have 2 other shortcuts to do more advanced stuff, which greatly improve upon the shortcut outlined here.

But you can definitely use those one as a template for your own. Split and Text Case are both worth understanding if you’re going to make your own shortcuts.