How to Automatically Assign a Todoist Task to a User When It's Moved to a Section

On a shared Todoist board, work moves through sections as it progresses, something like “To Do”, “In Progress”, “In Review”, and “Done”. Each time a task lands in a new section, there’s usually a specific person who should pick it up next. The reviewer takes over when it hits “In Review”, QA steps in when it reaches “Testing”, and so on down the board.

But, Todoist won’t hand the task over for you. Someone has to remember to open the task and set the assignee by hand, every single time. On a busy board that handoff is exactly the step that slips, and a task can sit in “In Review” for days with nobody’s name on it.

So, in this post we’re going to fix that with Doify. By the end of it, you’ll have a rule that assigns a task to the right collaborator automatically the moment it enters a section, with no manual handoff required.

Why Todoist Can’t Auto-Assign Tasks When They Change Section

To be clear up front, Todoist isn’t missing assignment. On a shared project you can assign a task to a collaborator by hand, and you can reassign it to someone else whenever you like. What Todoist has no concept of is doing that automatically in response to an event, like a task moving into a section. Every assignment is a manual edit that you have to remember to make, and Todoist only lets you assign one person to a task at a time.

The workarounds people reach for don’t really close that gap. General-purpose automation platforms like Zapier and Make can connect to Todoist and set an assignee, but really only when a task is being created rather than when it moves between sections. Neither exposes a clean “task moved into a section” trigger, so reproducing this handoff there is awkward and multi-step. And, the pricing rarely makes sense for one small rule. Zapier’s free tier only covers 100 tasks per month, and the cheapest paid plan after that is $29.99 per month, which is more than most people pay for Todoist itself.

The other route is a self-hosted script like autodoist . It handles labels and sections, but it doesn’t do assignment at all, and it’s a tool you have to install, configure, and keep running yourself.

So, both routes fall short. This is where Doify can help.

How Doify Assigns Tasks Automatically on a Section Change

Doify lets you listen to events that happen in your Todoist account and run actions in response to them. We call these triggers and actions , and rules are how you pair them together into an automation. For this workflow we pair the Enter a Section trigger with the Assign to User action, so the moment a task enters your chosen section, it’s handed to the collaborator you’ve picked.

Before we configure anything, there are a couple of details worth mentioning.

The first, and most important, is that this only works on projects shared with other Todoist collaborators. Assignment itself is a shared-project feature in Todoist, so if you try to set this up on a personal project there’s simply no one to hand the task to. The rule needs a shared project to act on.

The second is that Todoist allows a single assignee per task, so the rule assigns the task to one chosen collaborator rather than a group.

Finally, there’s a detail worth flagging for peace of mind. If the target collaborator later loses access to the shared project, Doify will automatically pause the rule.

How to Configure This Rule

1. Sign up to Doify (the free plan is fine for this guide). During sign-up you’ll connect your Todoist account, which is how Doify is able to listen for events and assign tasks on your behalf.
2. Make sure the project you want to automate is shared with the collaborator you’re going to assign tasks to.
3. Create a new rule. Rules are the core of Doify’s automation, with each rule pairing a trigger with an action to run when the trigger fires.
4. Choose the Enter a Section trigger. This tells Doify to watch for tasks moving into a section in your account.
5. Choose the target project and the section that should trigger the assignment, for example “In Review”.
6. Choose the Assign to User action. This is what hands the task over each time the trigger fires.
7. Pick the collaborator the task should be assigned to.
8. Create the rule.

With the rule active, any task that enters that section in that project is assigned to your chosen collaborator automatically, without anyone opening the task to do it by hand.

Recap

In this post we’ve looked at why Todoist makes you assign collaborators by hand, one person at a time, with no way to tie an assignment to a task moving through your board. We then built a Doify rule that pairs the Enter a Section trigger with the Assign to User action, so tasks are handed to the right person automatically as they move through the sections of a shared project.

If you’d like to keep going with section-based automation, our guide on automatically moving completed tasks to a different section uses the same section territory from a different angle, and automatically applying or removing labels when a task changes section pairs a section trigger with a labelling action. If you have any questions about Doify or this workflow, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

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FAQs

Can Todoist Automatically Assign a Task to Someone?

No native automation links an event to an assignment. On a shared project you assign tasks by hand, one person per task, and Todoist never does it for you in response to something like a task moving. To automate it you need a third-party tool like Doify and its Assign to User action.

Does This Work on a Personal, Non-Shared Project?

No. Assignment in Todoist only exists on projects shared with other collaborators, so the rule needs a shared project to act on. On a personal project there’s no one to hand the task to.

How Quickly Does the Assignment Happen After the Task Moves?

Within moments. The Enter a Section trigger is event-driven rather than checked on a schedule, so the assignment lands almost as soon as the task enters the section.

Can I Assign a Task to More Than One Person?

No. Todoist allows a single assignee per task, so the rule assigns the task to one chosen collaborator. If a stage genuinely needs two people, you’d typically split it into separate tasks.

What Happens if the Assignee Leaves the Project?

Doify automatically pauses the rule rather than failing silently, so it won’t keep trying to assign tasks to someone who can no longer access the project. You can delete the rule within Doify at any point after it’s been paused.

Can I Set This Up for Every Project at Once?

Each Assign to User rule targets one specific shared project, so you create one rule per project, or per section handoff, rather than a single account-wide rule.

Does This Work on iOS and Mobile?

Yes. Doify runs independently of the Todoist app, so it applies your rules based on what happens in your account regardless of the device or platform, whether that’s web, desktop, Android, or iOS.