How to Automatically Apply or Remove Labels in Todoist When a Task Changes Section

It’s common to have Todoist workflows that pair sections and labels together to track the status of a task. But, the moment you start moving tasks between sections, you then have to remember to swap the labels by hand which is a recipe for a broken workflow.

And, since Todoist has no native way to automate either side of this setup, the work falls to you and as soon as you get busy, the workflow falls apart. But, don’t worry, by the end of this post you’ll have a Doify rule set up that swaps your Todoist labels for you whenever a task moves between sections.

Why Todoist Can’t Automate Labels Based on Section Changes

Todoist exposes no way to react to a task moving into or out of a section, and no way to add or remove a label automatically. So, if you want a workflow that uses either of these, you’ll need to do it by hand, much to the disappointment of the wider community who have been asking for features like these for years.

The current way of doing this workflow is painful. You drag the task into the new section, then open the task, remove the old label, and add the new one. That’s at least three extra clicks per task, and the kind of action that easily gets skipped when you’re moving fast or short on time. And, what’s the end result? Labels drifting out of sync and a workflow that starts to fall apart.

With no native option available, what about third-party automation tools like IFTTT, Zapier, or Make? These can connect to Todoist, but they’re priced and built for stitching hundreds of apps together, not for simple Todoist automations. For a single Todoist rule, the cost and configuration overhead of these tools is overkill, and some of them don’t expose section-change triggers at all, so you end up paying for capabilities you can’t access.

This is where Doify comes in.

How to Set Up Todoist Label Automations by Section Using Doify

Doify allows you to listen to events that happen in your Todoist account and then perform actions in response to them. We call these triggers and actions , and rules are how you pair them together to create automations. For this workflow, the relevant triggers are Enter a Section and Leave a Section , and the relevant actions are Add Label and Remove Label . By combining these two triggers and two actions, you have four possible rules to choose from:

• Enter a Section + Add Label : moving a task into “In Review” labels it `needs-review` .
• Enter a Section + Remove Label : moving a task into “Done” strips the `in-progress` label.
• Leave a Section + Add Label : moving a task out of “Backlog” tags it `active` .
• Leave a Section + Remove Label : moving a task out of “In Review” removes `needs-review` .

How to Configure These Rules in Doify

1. Sign up to Doify . The free plan is fine for this guide.
2. Once you’re signed in, open the rules page and create a new rule .
3. Choose the trigger. Pick Enter a Section if you want the automation to run when a task arrives in a section, or Leave a Section if you want it to run when a task is moved out of one.
4. Choose the target project for the rule to monitor. If you’re on the Pro plan , you can target all projects with a single rule instead.
5. Choose the section you want the rule to watch.
6. Choose the action, either Add Label or Remove Label .
7. Choose the label you want to apply or remove.
8. Create the rule.

With the rule active, every matching section change in your monitored project will update the label for you. Test it by moving a task in or out of the target section and watching the label update automatically.

Building a Full Section-to-Label Workflow

To keep a single status label in sync across a real workflow, you can stack multiple rules together.

Take a project with “Backlog”, “In Progress”, “In Review”, and “Done” sections, where each section maps to a corresponding label. For each transition you care about, create one rule that uses Enter a Section and Add Label to apply the new label, and a second rule that uses Leave a Section and Remove Label to strip the old label. With those rules in place, the label always reflects the section the task currently sits in.

Finally, if you want to apply a default label as soon as a task is created, use the Task is Created trigger, which we cover in automatically applying labels to new Todoist tasks .

Recap

So, to recap, in this post we’ve looked at why Todoist can’t react to section changes or update labels on its own, why general-purpose automation platforms are an unnecessarily expensive way to solve a single-app problem, and how Doify’s Enter a Section and Leave a Section triggers paired with the Add Label and Remove Label actions give you complete Todoist label automations in a few minutes.

If you want to explore other automations you can set up in Todoist, take a look at how to automatically reschedule overdue tasks to today or how to automatically move completed tasks to a different section .

FAQs

Can You Automatically Add a Label to a Todoist Task When It Changes Section?

Not natively in Todoist. However, with Doify you can pair the Enter a Section trigger with the Add Label action, which applies a label to any task moved into the section you’ve chosen to monitor.

Can You Automatically Remove a Label From a Todoist Task When It Changes Section?

Not natively. But, Doify’s Leave a Section trigger paired with the Remove Label action handles this in a single rule by stripping the chosen label from any task that leaves the watched section.

Does Todoist Support Automation When a Task Moves Between Sections?

No, Todoist exposes no built-in trigger for section changes. However, Doify adds both Enter a Section and Leave a Section triggers on top of your Todoist account, which is what makes section-based label automation possible.

How Do You Keep Todoist Labels in Sync With Task Status?

Model each status as a section, then create a Doify rule per transition that adds the new status label and removes the old one. Typically, you’d use two rules per section, one to add the new label and one to remove the old one.

How Do You Automate Todoist Label Changes on iOS or Android?

Todoist itself doesn’t support this kind of automation on any platform. But, because Doify runs against your Todoist account rather than the app on your device, the rules trigger no matter where you move the task from.

Is There a Free Way to Add Label Automation to Todoist?

Yes. Doify’s free plan lets you create rules that target a single project, which is enough to automate label changes for one project’s sections. The Pro plan lifts that limit so a single rule can cover every project at once.