Reclaim AI and Todoist: Set Up Task Sync and Scheduling

Reclaim AI and Todoist work together to turn your task list into scheduled time blocks on your calendar. Reclaim reads your Todoist tasks, respects your existing events, and finds space for the work automatically. Tools like fenbs keep the planning rules and priority decisions that drive how you want that scheduling to work — outside the calendar, where an AI assistant can read them and understand the reasoning.

The integration reduces the friction of manual scheduling. The tradeoff is that the rules Reclaim follows — which tasks are high priority, how much buffer you need between meetings, when deep work should be protected — live in Reclaim's settings rather than in a place your AI assistant can read and reason about.

What Reclaim AI does with Todoist tasks

When you connect Todoist to Reclaim, Reclaim can pull in tasks and treat them as scheduling candidates. It analyzes your calendar, finds available time, and creates blocks for each task based on its due date, estimated duration, and priority. It also reschedules automatically when meetings shift.

Reclaim reads Todoist task priority, due dates, and labels. It does not read every custom field or sub-task hierarchy. Check Reclaim's integration documentation↗ (opens in a new tab) for what is currently synced, since the integration has changed between versions. The behavior you rely on today may differ from what is described in older guides.

How to connect Reclaim and Todoist

1. Sign in to Reclaim at reclaim.ai and go to Integrations in the settings.
2. Select Todoist and authorize Reclaim to access your Todoist account.
3. Choose which Todoist projects to sync. You do not have to sync everything — start with one project to verify the behavior.
4. Set the default task duration for tasks that do not have a time estimate in Todoist. Reclaim needs a duration to create a time block.
5. Check the scheduling settings: when you want Reclaim to schedule tasks (only during certain hours, for example), how much notice it needs before a due date, and whether it should schedule on weekends.

How Reclaim schedules synced tasks

Reclaim creates "scheduling tasks" on your calendar — time blocks that it will automatically move if a conflict arises. It respects events marked as busy and leaves space around meetings if you configure buffer time. When a task's due date is close, Reclaim gives it higher urgency and schedules it sooner.

If Reclaim cannot find space before a due date, it flags the task as unschedulable. You then need to either extend the due date, reduce the estimated duration, or manually clear calendar time. This is a useful signal: it means you have more work than calendar space, and something needs to change.

What to check after connecting

After connecting Todoist, give Reclaim a day to schedule your existing tasks. Then check three things:

• Priority order: are high-priority tasks scheduled before lower-priority ones? Check whether Reclaim is reading Todoist priority levels as you expect.
• Duration estimates: are the time blocks a reasonable length? A task with no duration estimate in Todoist gets Reclaim's default, which may not match the actual work.
• Scheduling windows: is Reclaim scheduling tasks at times you intended? If it is blocking time during your best focus hours for low-priority work, adjust the scheduling preferences.

For testing that an integration behaves as expected, see integration testing for a general framework you can adapt to any tool connection.

The planning decisions Reclaim cannot hold

Reclaim schedules based on due dates, durations, and priorities. It does not know why a task is high priority, what the strategic context is, or which rules you and your team have agreed about how work should be prioritized. Those decisions matter when an AI assistant is helping you plan, write task descriptions, or advise on what to tackle next.

Say a three-person design team agrees that client deliverables always take priority over internal projects, and that Thursdays are protected for deep work. Those are rules an AI assistant needs to give good scheduling advice. They are not captured in Reclaim's settings in a form an AI can read and reason about. For a broader look at how to use AI for daily work planning, see how to use AI at work.

How to keep your planning rules with fenbs

1. Create a free account and add a project for your work planning.
2. Write the standing rules — priority order, protected focus time, deadline policies — as Decisions and rules.
3. Add your current major tasks as items in fenbs with their priority and context. This is separate from Todoist's task list; fenbs holds the reasoning, Todoist holds the calendar-ready items.
4. Connect your AI assistant over MCP from Integrations. Ask it to read the project context before helping you plan or prioritize.
5. Update the rules when the team's priorities change. The next planning session starts from the current version.

fenbs does not connect directly to Reclaim or Todoist. It works alongside them: you manage the calendar scheduling in Reclaim, the task list in Todoist, and the reasoning behind your priorities in fenbs. An AI assistant connected to fenbs can help you decide what to add to Todoist and how to prioritize it — without you re-explaining the rules every time.