Connect Todoist and Run Your First Week With the Productivity Coach
You have set up the Productivity Coach and made your Mac reachable: the hooks are in, your knowledge folder has a private copy on GitHub if you wanted one, and your Mac answers from your phone.
This guide is the part you come back to. It is not one sitting. Step 1 is ten minutes today. The rest happen over a day, a week and a month, and each one reads what the one before it wrote.
What happens, and when
| When | What | Who starts it |
|---|---|---|
| Today, once | Connect Todoist | You |
| Every time you close a session | The day’s progress file is written or refreshed, committed, and pushed to GitHub if you connected it | Nobody. It is automatic |
| After a week closes | Weekly recap | You ask, or the agent offers in one line |
| First days of a month | Monthly recap | Same |
| On your cadence, right after its recap | Strategy file, exported | Same |
| Right after the strategy | The week’s tasks into Todoist | Same |
Only the daily file runs on its own. Everything else is offered at the right moment and waits for you.
Step 1 — Connect Todoist
Todoist is, on the face of it, a to-do list. The reason it is here is that ticking a task is the lightest possible way to put your work into the same timeline your agents already write to. You tick, and the tick is your log entry. Nobody writes a diary.
Create an account or sign in at todoist.com. Single sign-on with Google or Apple is the quick way.
Install the Second Brain OS integration. Enter the email you bought with in the form below, pick “Install the Second Brain OS Todoist Integration”, and submit. You are sent to Todoist to approve it, and that is the whole install.
You do not need to tell the agent which project to use. It reads that from your account and defaults to your Inbox.
Put capture one keystroke away on the desktop. Install the Todoist app for Mac (pick “Apple Silicon” on an M-series machine) or Windows. Then Settings → Advanced → Quick Add Task, and set a shortcut. I use Control + Command + A.
And one tap away on the phone. Install the app, add the “Quick Add” widget to your home screen, and put it somewhere your thumb already goes. On iPhone, add the Todoist widget to the lock screen too: Settings → Wallpaper → Customize. That one is the game changer, because the task gets written before the phone is even unlocked.
The point of all four is friction. A task you have to open an app to write is a task that stays in your head, and your head is where “I’ll reply to those leads” goes to die.
Checkpoint: ask the agent to list your open tasks. It should answer from your Todoist, and tell you which project it is using.
Step 2 — Your first daily file
Work normally for a day, then close the session.
What appears is not a log. Commits and activity events are merged into themes — “Newsletter pillar”, “Client onboarding” — because that is how you remember your day. A theme with three or more items gets marked as major progress. The footer counts commits and events and notes your shutdown time.
Several sessions in one day each refresh the same file with a fuller picture. That is intended.
One detail that matters more than it sounds: every date comes from your local timezone, never UTC. Just after midnight, a UTC date is still yesterday — which would file the day under the wrong weekday and create a second file instead of updating today’s.
Step 3 — The weekly recap, and the one question
Ask for it, or let it offer after a week closes.
It reads the seven daily files locally. No cloud, no re-reading your activity log.
Then, before writing anything, it asks you one question: what dragged this week?
Your answer leads. The files are evidence. This ordering is the point — a recap assembled purely from artefacts tells you what happened, not what it cost, and the second is the part you can act on.
Out comes Shipped, In progress, Dropped, a named pattern, and three to five carry-forward items. Under 60 lines. The daily files hold the detail.
Dropped is the section to actually read. Things you started and abandoned, or planned and never began. Nothing else in your week surfaces these.
Step 4 — The monthly recap, and why patterns matter later
First days of the month, or on request.
Builds from the weekly recaps, filling gaps by meaning-searching the daily files for things that never made it into a weekly. Then three questions, one at a time: what moved the needle, what dragged, what will you stop.
Two sections do the work:
Against last month’s carry forward — each item marked done, partly, or not touched. This is the honest one. Carry-forward lists quietly become wishlists without it.
Patterns observed — two to four recurring patterns, named in your words from what your own files show.
Those patterns are not decoration. Later, when you ask the agent to create a task outside the weekly batch, it checks that task against them and says in one line whether it fits. Your own observed behaviour becomes the filter on new commitments.
Step 5 — Strategy, exported
On your cadence, right after the matching recap.
The agent proposes Focus, Bets, Not doing, Numbers, Tasks. You cut, swap or confirm — one round, not an interview. Limits are deliberate: never more than five bets, never more than five tasks a week. A strategy listing twelve priorities is a list, not a strategy.
Then it exports to HTML in the same step, using one fixed stylesheet. Self-contained, dark-mode aware, prints cleanly. You can send it to someone without explaining what a markdown file is.
No slide decks. PDF only if you ask.
Step 6 — Tasks into Todoist
The strategy’s Tasks section, reconciled with what you already have open before anything is written.
You see three lists: to create, to carry over with a new date, to drop. One round of confirmation. Nothing is created that you did not confirm, and nothing is created twice.
New tasks are spread across the working week, not dumped on Monday. Each task’s Todoist id is written back into the strategy file, so the document and your task list stay connected.
Two limits worth knowing now rather than discovering later: the agent cannot change a task’s project or description after creating it, and it cannot close a task. Those stay yours in Todoist.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly recap finds no files | Collection mask is *.md instead of **/*.md |
Files live in subfolders, so the collection indexed nothing. Re-register with the right mask |
| Day filed under the wrong weekday | Date derived from UTC | Every date part must come from one local reading |
| Tasks appear from unrelated projects | Filter leaked scope | Filters must end with the project clause; never use no date or a bare | |
| Agent says it has no Todoist tools, or tasks fail to create | The integration was not approved, or a different email was used in the form | Redo Step 1 with the email on your Second Brain OS account, then reconnect the SBOS MCP server |
| No daily file after closing a session | A setup problem, not a usage one | The setup guide’s troubleshooting table covers the hook, the guards and the backup |
What you can do now
Ask “what did I do this week” and get an answer you did not have to assemble.
More usefully: ask what kept happening. The monthly recap names the patterns, scores what you carried forward, and then quietly holds you to them the next time you add something.
Your week stopped being something you reconstruct from memory on a Friday afternoon.
What this does not do
It does not capture notes — that is the Knowledge Work Coach, and this agent will point you there if you ask it to save something.
It does not back up your notes on its own. With GitHub connected, the automatic backup covers the daily progress files and nothing else; everything else you write goes up when you commit it, or ask the agent to. Without GitHub, nothing leaves your Mac.
And it does not run anything unasked. It offers in one line at the right moment and waits. The daily file is automatic; the recaps, the strategy and the tasks are yours to call.
