# How can I beemind the number of tasks \*due\* today in Todoist (or RememberTheMilk)? **URL:** \ **Category:** Akrasia\ **Created:** [December 9, 2022, 9:56pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659 "2022-12-09T21:56:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![pyng](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@pyng](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/pyng)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2022, 9:56pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/1 "2022-12-09T21:56:59Z")
Similar to this: > [@Total number of unchecked ToDos in Todoist](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/total-number-of-unchecked-todos-in-todoist/589): > > Hi, Is there a way to use Zapier or IFTTT to log the total number of unchecked ToDos in Todoist, as opposed to sending a value = 1 every time a todo item is checked? Like for inbox zero, it is more helpful to log how many tasks are left, rather than how many have been completed. thanks! giovanni But I want to be able to beemind the total number of tasks due today. (Also I’m interested in being able to beemind the total number to today or earlier.) If I set it at a constant of, say, 5, then every day there cannot be more than 5 uncompleted tasks due that day. If I set it to a constant of 0 then it means by the end of the day there must be no more uncompleted tasks due that day. It’s a bit like inbox zero, but not for the actual inbox “project” in Todoist; rather it’s for the current day. I’m interested in this because I want to use the [Systemist](https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/systemist#5-get-to-to-do-list-zero-daily) method and I want to beemind it. ---
**Author:** ![clivemeister](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/clivemeister/32/2034_2.png) [@clivemeister](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/clivemeister)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2022, 7:31am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/2 "2022-12-10T07:31:05Z")
It’s hard to have a variable number of tasks each day as the Beeminder goal, as the “number of ToDos for today” would then be “today’s slope for the bright red goal line”, and you can’t change that less than 7 days in advance (due to the akrasia horizon). So you’d have to know a week or more in advance what your to-do list was for the day, which is improbable. Maybe you could calculate the fraction of today’s tasks completed? So the goal is 100% (which you could set as a constant slope of 1.0), and if you achieve 70% of those then that’s what you’d record (with 0.7 as a datapoint). You’d have to do the calculation of percent complete somewhere - definitely doable in principle through some custom scripts and the API, but I don’t know IFTTT or Zapier well enough to know if you could use them. ---
**Author:** ![pyng](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@pyng](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/pyng)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2022, 2:50pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/3 "2022-12-10T14:50:00Z")
> [@clivemeister](#): > > It’s hard to have a variable number of tasks each day as the Beeminder goal, as the “number of ToDos for today” would then be “today’s slope for the bright red goal line”, and you can’t change that less than 7 days in advance (due to the akrasia horizon). So you’d have to know a week or more in advance what your to-do list was for the day, which is improbable. That’s not what I want. I don’t want to track the number of tasks completed (needing to adjust the slop depending on how many tasks are due). I want to track the number of uncompleted tasks on today’s due date. ---
**Author:** ![clivemeister](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/clivemeister/32/2034_2.png) [@clivemeister](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/clivemeister)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2022, 3:31pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/4 "2022-12-10T15:31:28Z")
Ah, I see! Sorry, I misunderstood: if you have 7 uncompleted tasks for today, you want to log the value 7, is that right? Looks like you could do this via a script, as you can retrieve a list of active tasks, [filtered by due-date](https://todoist.com/help/articles/introduction-to-filters) of today. You’d want to make decisions like “do I count tasks due yesterday but not done?”, all of which look do-able. There seem to be some [command-line interfaces for Todoist](https://github.com/sachaos/todoist) out there, too, which might help if you’re not up to much coding. ---
**Author:** ![pyng](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@pyng](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/pyng)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2022, 5:50pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/5 "2022-12-10T17:50:35Z")
> [@clivemeister](#): > > Ah, I see! Sorry, I misunderstood: if you have 7 uncompleted tasks for today, you want to log the value 7, is that right? Yes, exactly! > [@clivemeister](#): > > Looks like you could do this via a script, as you can retrieve a list of active tasks, [filtered by due-date](https://todoist.com/help/articles/introduction-to-filters) of today. You’d want to make decisions like “do I count tasks due yesterday but not done?”, all of which look do-able. There seem to be some [command-line interfaces for Todoist](https://github.com/sachaos/todoist) out there, too, which might help if you’re not up to much coding. So I’d need to have the script hosted on some VPS or something, right? ---
**Author:** ![clivemeister](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/clivemeister/32/2034_2.png) [@clivemeister](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/clivemeister)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2022, 5:57pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/6 "2022-12-10T17:57:17Z")
> So I’d need to have the script hosted on some VPS or something, right? You definitely could do it that way! I’d just have a script locally on my machine, I think. I have several already myself, to do things like “count the number of red goals”. When I run them they automatically send a datapoint to Beeminder. So you’d just have something like that, which you run by hand, or have a little scheduler to run for you. If you were thinking about running it in the cloud, a VPS is overkill: you could use the [Google Compute Platform’s ability to run a script on a schedule](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/how-to-schedule-a-recurring-python-script-on-gcp), or equivalent from Amazon or whoever. ---
**Author:** ![pyng](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@pyng](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/pyng)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2022, 6:58pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/7 "2022-12-10T18:58:06Z")
> [@clivemeister](#): > > I’d just have a script locally on my machine, I think. Although then I’d have to make sure my machine was powered up and online at the right time each day, right? Whereas a VPS or the GCP scheduler would be continuous. ---
**Author:** ![clivemeister](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.beeminder.com/clivemeister/32/2034_2.png) [@clivemeister](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/clivemeister)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2022, 7:49am UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/8 "2022-12-12T07:49:36Z")
> Although then I’d have to make sure my machine was powered up and online at the right time each day, right? Whereas a VPS or the GCP scheduler would be continuous. Correct! I leave my machine on all the time as it does various house-serving functions, but ymmv, and then I’m probably go with the GCP scheduler (probably lower cost than a VPS, unless you can maybe schedule the VPS to turn on and off each day for just a few minutes?) ---
**Author:** ![pyng](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/5daacb/32.png) [@pyng](https://forum.beeminder.com/u/pyng)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2022, 2:47pm UTC](https://forum.beeminder.com/t/how-can-i-beemind-the-number-of-tasks-due-today-in-todoist-or-rememberthemilk/10659/9 "2022-12-12T14:47:51Z")
Okay, I’ll look into it. Remember The Milk actually now has built-in scripting. I wonder if I can get that to connect to Beeminder.