How to Prevent Completing a Todoist Task Until All Sub-tasks Are Complete

Todoist lets you complete a parent task whenever you want, even if none of its sub-tasks are complete. And, by completing the parent, it’ll complete any open sub-tasks along with it. Much to users’ disappointment, there is no native setting to require the sub-tasks to be completed first, which is a real issue if you treat your sub-tasks as dependencies of the parent.

So, in this post, we’re going to look at how to solve that issue with Doify by creating a rule that re-opens any parent task the moment you complete it if its sub-tasks are still open. This means a task can’t be completed if it still has unfinished work underneath it.

Why Todoist Can’t Stop You Completing a Parent Before Its Sub-tasks

Todoist has no native way to gate a parent task on the state of its sub-tasks. Completing the parent always succeeds, regardless of whether the sub-tasks underneath it are complete or not. So the checklist you carefully built into a task isn’t actually enforced by anything.

Take a “Deploy feature” task with three sub-tasks: “Run tests”, “Update changelog”, and “Tag version”. Nothing stops you, or a teammate, from ticking off “Deploy feature” with all three sub-tasks still open. The moment you do, your board says all of the work is finished when it clearly isn’t, and anyone relying on that information has now been misled.

The Uncompletable Task Trick Doesn’t Gate Anything

The solution most commonly quoted for this problem online is the “uncompletable task” trick, where you prefix a sub-task’s name with an asterisk. This feels like it should help, but it doesn’t do what people think. Prefixing a sub-task with a ”*” only hides its checkbox and doesn’t gate the parent at all. Complete the parent and the “uncompletable” sub-task still gets marked done behind the scenes, with the circle icon simply staying hidden. It’s a visual trick, not real enforcement.

How Doify Ensures Sub-tasks Are Complete Before the Parent

Doify lets you listen to events in your Todoist account and run actions in response to them. We call these triggers and actions .

For this use case, we pair the Task Completed trigger with the Ensure Sub-tasks Completed action. This means when you complete a parent task while any of its sub-tasks are still open, Doify will re-open the parent for you. It’ll also re-open any sub-tasks that Todoist automatically completed when the parent was completed, returning the task to exactly the state it was in before the parent was completed.

Before we look at setting this up in Doify, there is one important detail we want to cover about this rule. Doify won’t block you completing the parent task in real time, because Todoist doesn’t expose a way for third-party tools to intercept a completion as it happens. Instead, Doify reacts to the completion event and re-opens the task within moments when the sub-tasks aren’t all complete. The end result is the same, since you can’t leave a parent sitting completed with open sub-tasks, but Doify gets you there by re-opening the task rather than preventing the click in the first place.

Configuring the Rule in Doify

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 completions and re-open tasks on your behalf.
2. 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.
3. Choose the Task Completed trigger. This tells Doify to watch for completed tasks in your Todoist account.
4. Choose the target project you want the rule to run in. The rule only fires for tasks completed inside that project, which keeps it scoped to where it’s relevant. On the Pro plan , you can target every project with a single rule instead of creating one per project.
5. Choose the Ensure Sub-tasks Completed action. This is the action that re-opens the parent whenever it’s completed with sub-tasks still open.
6. Create your rule. Doify starts listening for completions in your chosen project immediately.

To see your new rule in action, add a task with a couple of open sub-tasks, complete the parent, and watch Doify re-open it within a few moments. Then complete the sub-tasks first followed by the parent, and confirm it stays complete. From that point on, any parent you try to complete with open sub-tasks in your target project will be automatically re-opened until the sub-tasks are also complete.

Recap

In this post we’ve looked at why Todoist has no native way to require sub-tasks to be completed before their parent, and why the usual workarounds, especially the asterisk and uncompletable task trick, don’t enforce anything. We then configured a Doify rule that re-opens a parent automatically whenever it’s completed with sub-tasks still open, so your sub-task checklists are actually respected.

If you’d like to automate more of your Todoist workflow, the same Task Completed trigger also powers our guide on automatically moving completed tasks to a different section . And 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 Require Sub-tasks to Be Completed Before the Parent?

No. Completing a parent task in Todoist always succeeds regardless of the state of its sub-tasks, and there’s no setting to change that behaviour. To enforce it you need a third-party tool like Doify, which re-opens the parent if you complete it with sub-tasks still open.

Does Doify Block the Completion or Undo It?

It undoes it. Todoist doesn’t let third-party tools intercept a completion as it happens, so Doify reacts to the completion and re-opens the parent within moments when any sub-tasks are still open. The outcome is the same, since a parent can’t sit completed with unfinished sub-tasks, but it works by re-opening the task rather than blocking the original click.

Isn’t This What the Uncompletable (*) Task Trick Is For?

No. The asterisk trick only hides a sub-task’s checkbox and doesn’t stop the parent from being completed. Complete the parent and the sub-task is still marked done behind the scenes. Doify is what actually enforces the gate by re-opening the parent until the sub-tasks are genuinely complete.

Does This Work on Mobile Too?

Yes. Because Doify runs separately from the Todoist app you’re using, the rule applies no matter which platform you complete the task on, whether that’s web, desktop, Android, or iOS.