Pleexy: The bridge between your Trello and Todoist

When it comes to organizing your work or personal life (or both!), many people are employing the use of productivity apps to help keep track of their day-to-day and longer-term tasks. Two of the more popular applications that people have adopted widespread usage of are Trello and Todoist. While using one of these applications may be more than enough for some people, for others, using these two simultaneously is the most optimal way of providing order to their lives.

Why Use Trello & Todoist Simultaneously

So you may be thinking to yourself, why would I use two different task management applications at the same time? And the reason is quite simple: some tasks are easier and quicker to knock off the list while others may involve more work, time, and include a lot more planning to complete that task.

For example, a task or project that could take a bit of time is learning how to cook (if you don’t know how to do so already). But to learn how to cook, what is required? You could read a cookbook. You could watch some YouTube videos. You could download some recipes online. You could shadow your mother in the kitchen as she cooks supper. All of these things are actionable items that could be completed rather quickly but completing the overall goal, of learning how to cook, could take weeks, even months. This is how Trello and Todoist come into play and can complement each other. For actionable items that can be completed in days to a few weeks, those tasks would fall into your Todoist. For higher-level projects that will take a bit more time to complete, from many weeks to months, Trello would be your best application. Let’s take a look at the dashboards for Todoist and Trello using a fictitious wedding project.

Trello

As you can see in this Trello dashboard, there is a 4-month outlook, starting in April which consists of tasks that would be required to fulfill in order to get married. One of the benefits of using Trello is that it enables you to get a high level outlook of how your schedule will play out. How you schedule that is completely up to you. It could be a weekly outlook or if you’re looking for a higher-level overview, a month-to-month setup, like in the screenshot, can be applied as well. The key takeaway is that here, you’re able to get a good sense of the project roadmap and how that will play out going forward. Now, let’s take a look at the Todoist dashboard.

Todoist

In the Todoist dashboard, you can see that the tasks created within the Wedding 2019 project are actionable tasks that can and should be completed rather quickly. A few of the tasks here are directly correlated with the cards in Trello. For example, signing up for a wedding website and adding content to the website tasks in Todoist are directly tied to the ‘Create wedding website’ card in Trello.

So think of it this way. Consider the cards you create in Trello as ‘mini-projects’ and the actionable items in Todoist as the ‘tasks’ you need to complete in order to advance and complete the mini-projects.

Synchronization of Trello and Todoist

It can be tedious to log in to both of these productivity apps everyday to knock off items from the list. Wouldn’t it be nice to sync up both your Trello and Todoist so that if a task is knocked off in one, that change is reflected in the other app?

Enter Pleexy.

Pleexy is the bridge between Trello and Todoist that helps to provide synchronization between these apps and your life. With Pleexy, you’ll be able to customize how you want the workflow of synchronization to work between your Trello and Todoist. Now you might be thinking, why do I need a third application in the mix? Well, we want to keep your life as simple as possible and with this integration, all you really need to do is customize the functions you want Pleexy to perform and it will do the rest!

Let’s see Pleexy in action.

Starting Pleexy

After you sign up for an account on Pleexy, you can then select the two apps you want it to connect and synchronize. For this example, we’ll choose Trello and Todoist. After enabling Pleexy to gain control of certain functions, you are all set to modify your settings to your liking.

Source

In the first section of Pleexy’s settings, you need to establish how Pleexy will search for your cards, and from which boards, in Trello. Because we’re working with our fictitious wedding, we’ll choose the Wedding 2019 board from Trello.

Doing this will enable your cards to be transferred over as an actionable item in Todoist, giving you greater visibility and in a way, a friendly reminder, that this is the mini-project some of your everyday tasks in Todoist are working towards completing.

Destination

Next up, select where you want Pleexy to create the tasks for the imported Trello cards in your Todoist. Depending on the project you have created in your Todoist, you can select whichever project is appropriate for the incoming Trello cards. For this purpose, we will choose the Wedding 2019 Tasks because the cards we are importing have to do with our wedding planning.

Settings

In this section, all you really need to focus on is the naming convention of the task title template and we’ll show an example of what that looks like next. So here, Pleexy is asking you how do you want the imported Trello card to look like, as an actionable item, in Todoist. The default setting in Pleexy explains that they will name the imported card according to where that card lives in what list and in what board. So, for our fictitious wedding, and using this specific setting, it will look like this:

Based off of the default naming convention, you can see that Pleexy will create a task in Todoist using this naming convention. It’s saying that the card created will be created from the Wedding 2019 board in Trello, from the April 2019 list in Trello, and from the Choose wedding venue card in Trello. Of course, you can modify the naming convention as you see fit but this is what the default setting will look like.

Trello to Todoist

So you make a change to a card or cards in Trello. What happens to your Todoist? Well, you can tell Pleexy what to do. There are only two options of what Pleexy will do in Todoist when there is a change made to a card in Trello.

Todoist to Trello

On the flip side, when a task is completed in Todoist, here is the default setting of what Pleexy will do in your Trello.

Example

Let’s see how this synchronization works. So we’ve completed the different actionable items related to choosing our wedding vendors. We’ve had calls with different vendors and we’ve made our collective decision to move forward with a few vendors we’ve been having conversations with. I’m going to tick off the first actionable item in Todoist (remember the 3-step syntax Pleexy’s default settings established) — Wedding 2019: April 2019 — Choose wedding vendors.

After we tick that actionable item off, let’s see how that change is reflected in our Trello board.

As we can see here, by ticking off the actionable item in Todoist, Pleexy is interpreting that we have completed that particular item and is putting it in the list we have told it to put it in. For this example, we told Pleexy to put the card in the last list which we have labelled Completed Tasks.

Conclusion

Using Pleexy can be a tremendous time-saver because it prevents you from logging on to both applications on a daily basis to see what is going on. Having your Trello cards imported to your Todoist gives you greater visibility and allows you to get a higher-level outlook of what needs to be done in the next few months in your everyday planner. Pleexy is the bridge between your everyday, actionable items and your longer-term, time-consuming projects.

Set it up and start saving your time today!