How I use Todoist to manage my Beeminder goals with n8n

FYI I work for n8n. This is not an ad though. I was a Beeminder user long before that.

Now that we got the warning out of the way, I would love to share with you how I use n8n and Todoist to manage my goals.

I love using checklists to input my data into Beeminder… I find it easier to go through daily tasks in a simple todo list. Unlike the Beeminder app, once I check off an item it disappears. I can also have todo items that are not necessarily tied to a goal. It’s easier to skim through. I can add deadlines and tags, and also have them only show up on specific days.

I tried building my own version of this before. You can see some screenshots of this before here.

The problems with this was maintainability… It was hard to add features and maintain it. I used JSON to represent the form but it was hard to edit in mobile… It was a fun little side project.

With Todoist and n8n, I can get all the power of the Todoist and Beeminder goals…

How it works… I have a daily project in Todoist and a template project.
Screenshot 2023-10-27 at 20.21.22

In the template project, I have all the template todo items.


In the description, I set the days I want the todo item to show up. I add the due date at which I want the item to be due (and get a notification for it). I also add the goal there as well as points (by default 1) and a comment.

I have an n8n workflow that runs every morning at 5am to delete all uncompleted items tagged with daily. If it has a sticky tag, it’s not deleted. If it has neither tags, it’s moved to Inbox.

At 5:10am, it executes a workflow to create the daily todo items in the main project.

The result is this (on a Friday)…

In the background, I have a workflow takes every completed todo item (every 5 minutes)… If it has a goal and no label (bot_processed), then it sends a point to that goal on Beeminder (and adds the label bot_processed to avoid duplicating).

It sends a point to Beeminder :white_check_mark:

In Beeminder :tada:

As you can see, I have a todo item to make sure I review the Beeminder goals in the app and stay on top of them. I still have the Beeminder app also in the background for alerts and stuff.

If anyone is interested, I can share the JSON for these workflows here. You can copy paste them directly into n8n and set this up. If you have any questions, let me know.

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This looks super cool!

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This is neat. I’ve been doing the reverse (using Beeminder’s API to make tasks like “Prevent derail of goalx in N days”) because I like checking things off too, but I never thought to close the loop like this. Thanks for the inspiration.

I feel like the API’s “todayta” field is intended to support workflows like this, but I’ve only used the official iOS client and AFAIK all it does is show a checkmark.

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Thank you so much for writing this up! (And sorry I’ve been so slow to comment!) Looks amazing. I see there’s an integration page on n8n for Beeminder and we should get n8n into our gallery as well!

One small question: Could the last step, sending the +1 to Beeminder, be accomplished with the official Todoist/Beeminder integration?

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@dreev I have tried to use that before… I think the limitation of that is that it’s one project to one goal mapping (as far as I remember when I last tried it)… Here I am mapping one project to a lot of different goals…

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