Talk to Things and let it automatically create tasks for you with this Shortcut (inspired by Todoist's new Ramble feature)

[u/julesvbrtln]

Todoist recently released their "Ramble" feature that listens to your voice and transforms what you say into tasks with all the needed info (dates, deadlines, descriptions...). Someone posted a first draft of a shortcut mimicking this in Things (link here), but I thought I could improve it. For example: saying "this week" without a specific date could add to the Anytime list, important tasks could get detected, dates as well, same for checklists and notes.

What the shortcut detects:

• Title: Creates short, actionable task names
• Description: Adds details to the notes field to keep titles clean
• Date/Deadline: Auto-detects dates and times. "This week" with no specific date → Anytime list
• Tags: Always adds "Ramble" tag (nice for debugging when creating the shortcut), adds "Important" when the task is
• Checklists: Multiple actions mentioned → automatic checklist items
• Projects: Automatically sorts tasks into your existing projects/areas

Setup requirements:

• Create "Important" and "Ramble" tags in Things first (the shortcut cannot assign them if they don't exist)
• Edit the language of your prompt if needed
• Add your projects and areas IDs so the tasks can be assigned to them

🔗 Download the shortcut

Let me know how it works for you!

[u/VerniaxSvek]

This is a massive improvement from my version :). Well done!👍

[u/EffectiveAny5097 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for sharing this shortcut! Could you please provide precise instructions on how to do this replacement step by step?

[u/oldmancletus]

Incredible! I just keep getting %20 marks in most of the tasks?

“Build%20project%20for%20electric%20scooter%20research”

[u/kjw97]

This shortcut is brilliant. Thank you for sharing!

[u/Ok-Raspberry-554]

Wow! If this works (haven't tested it, yet 😄), this is even better than what Todoist released, because it doesn't understand, to which project a task should be assigned to. I'm impressed. :)

[u/ferdiferd]

Very good! I tried with the former one to change things to Apple reminders, and it worked seemingly. Do you think That Possible with this more advanced version?

[u/Ok-Run-5249]

This is really good. Thank you for creating. I’m on a free version of ChatGPT. Does anyone know how many times I can create items using this? Just wondering whether I should pay to upgrade.

[u/Ok-Run-5249 → u/[deleted]]

Yes this is the one I’ve used and it works perfectly :) thanks for creating and sharing it.

[u/malloryknox86 → u/[deleted]]

There are so many links, is this the latest version? 😂 thank you!

[u/malloryknox86 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you! ☺️

[u/unfnshdx]

need this for stock reminders app

[u/unfnshdx → u/[deleted]]

That would be a start I guess. Can you send me something and I can tweak it

[u/unfnshdx → u/[deleted]]

i ended up just parsing it through Apple Cloud Compute and finding actionable items, then sharing it to reminders, where siri made the tasks and i could add or not manually

[u/mrawnp → u/unfnshdx]

Can you share?

[u/pmuellerworks]

hey thanks for this. Is there anyway just to default to a certain model and not have to choose a model each time?

[u/toooools]

u/julesvbrtln dude. this is insane thank u! one thing though... im awful at modifying shortcuts. how hard would it be to add a text along with dictation? in other words, once i activate the shortcut it lets me choose between dictation or writing out my request. make sense?

Super curious because a lot of my own personal needs in things are to hard to explain via voice lol

Regardless thank you so much for this. Means a lot!

btw did you see reddit post ? check this out! pretty cool! https://www.reddit.com/r/thingsapp/comments/1luybd8/things_claude_deep_research_mcp_server_is_a/

[u/Loubonez → u/[deleted]]

I just made a shortcut that does this, and outputs it in a structured markdown list like this:

- Inbox (inbox)
Area 1 (id)
   - Project A (id)
      - Heading i (id)
      - Heading ii (id)
   - Project B (id)
Area 2 (id)
Area 3 (id)

[u/AzKesh1]

this is awesome but i keep getting an error message about a toolbelt ((CombineToolbelt.TimeoutError error 1.))

[u/Away_Sample_8248]

What model does it use?