Filter Todoist Tasks with Labels to Focus on What Matters

Table of Contents

How labels become the only thing you look at

The only way I survive in Todoist is with labels — I don’t use priorities, I barely use projects anymore, and I don’t even bother with due dates unless something is genuinely due that day. Labels are the only signals I trust. Every time I tried to add another layer of logic, it just made the morning review worse.

So I have this label called `@deepfocus`. It’s the one that’s supposed to surface the 2 or 3 tasks I can realistically do in a single sitting — usually stuff like writing scripts, shipping something in Zapier, fixing Notion formula errors, etc. But here’s what happened: a few weeks ago, I renamed it to `@focusdeep`. I just thought it sounded better or something. I didn’t realize this would completely scramble every filter that referenced the old label name. 🙂

Todoist doesn’t give any error or fallback when a filter breaks. So if your filter is pulling in `@deepfocus` and you rename the label, the filter just silently returns nothing. No warning. No fail-state. It just looks like you don’t have any tasks that match it. And depending on how you set things up, this might mean an empty Today view, or a full day of working on the wrong stuff without noticing.

Using filters to rescue foggy mornings

Every morning I open a filter called `@deepfocus & !@lowenergy & !@done`. That combo used to show me 5 to 8 tasks that were realistically doable with energy and headspace. After the rename, though, it just showed a blank list. I thought maybe I had accidentally completed all my deep tasks and gave myself a gold star that day. Spoiler: I hadn’t. They were just sitting there, disconnected from reality.

What made this worse is that I had other filters nested that depended on @deepfocus as a base — for example, a separate one called `today & @deepfocus` for time-blocking chunks, and a saved view that piped into an exported calendar feed for time-tracking with Cron calendar. All of these broke without me realizing. No warning. Nada.

If you don’t catch it fast, you start questioning your system. You start adding new labels. You start wondering why you feel burned out, only to realize 10 days later that your real work was never showing up. That’s the breakage. It doesn’t look like an error. It looks like you’re just disorganized.

How to refactor filters when labels change

Once I realized the issue, I had to manually go through every filter in the Filters tab to find references to `@deepfocus`. Todoist does not have a find and replace or a label usage tracker (¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Here’s what I ended up doing:

1. Searched the Filters tab text strings one by one for `deepfocus`
2. Edited each one that had `@deepfocus` to `@focusdeep`
3. Checked compound filters — some of mine were written like `@deepfocus & today` or `@deepfocus | @admin`, so I scanned those carefully
4. Don’t forget the mobile app — if you have widgets based on filters, those might silently fail too

Eventually I realized it would’ve been faster to just re-create the `@deepfocus` label and move on, but at this point I was committed. 😛

Nested filters mean nested breakage

One thing that snuck up on me was how filters depend on each other invisibly. I had saved filters that looked self-contained, but they referenced others indirectly. Here’s an example:

– Filter A: `@deepfocus`
– Filter B: `today & Filter A`
– Filter C: `Filter B & !@waiting`

If Filter A silently breaks because of a missing label, Filters B and C don’t collapse. They just show less or nothing. That made tracing the problem way harder. There’s no error trail, and if you forget that B depends on A, you might rewrite C needlessly or think your task input is messed up.

I had to create a mini table in Notion just to map which filters used which labels:

This also helped me audit labels I wasn’t using anymore — I had a few floating ghosts like `@readingmaterials` and `@shortbursts` that once had a purpose but never lived anywhere practical.

Why renaming labels is more dangerous than you think

I learned two weird things about label renaming in Todoist:

First — changing a label name does not propagate changes through filters or keyboard shortcuts. If you do `q` on desktop for quick add and type `@deepfocus`, it’ll still auto-suggest even if that label doesn’t exist anymore (cached input suggestions, apparently). That makes it maddeningly easy to re-create orphan labels by accident.

Second — if you rename a label and then a Zapier automation uses filters (like filtering for `@deepfocus` in an API call trigger), the Zap just fails silently. I had a Zap that used Todoist’s search API to pull task content into Notion with a filter like `@deepfocus & today`, and it quietly stopped sending anything. No webhook error, no failure alert — just emptiness.

The only fix was to go into Zapier, dig deep into the step’s configuration, and manually test a live call to see what came back. That’s how I caught it.

Better strategies for using labels without chaos

Here’s what I do now to avoid the cascade failure:

1. I freeze label names — once I make one, I do not rename it again unless I’ve first audited all filters and automation using it
2. I prefix automations with `_` or `auto_` to make async-related filters obvious (e.g., `@auto_calendar`)
3. I added a two-line note to my Todoist templates: one lists every label used, and the other shows filters that pull them in
4. Once per month, I run a dummy filter like `@nonexistentlabel` to test what failure looks like — it reminds me that null states are silent in Todoist

Now that I’ve been burned once, I feel like one of those elders who says “we don’t rename labels in this household” and people think I’m joking

Filtering labels across projects clearly

Beginners often assume that filtering by label only grabs items from the current project. Nope — if you use `@deepfocus` in a filter, it will pull in tasks from *any* project that’s using that label.

That’s a good thing most of the time, but if you’re not naming tasks consistently, your focus filters will grab legacy fluff like “refactor proposal diagram from 3 months ago.” It’s better to co-filter with something like:

“`
@deepfocus & today
“`

Or use project conditioning like:

“`
@deepfocus & (##Marketing | ##Engineering)
“`

That limits the filter to certain project names while still giving you label-level selection. But even then — and I say this as someone who’s renamed way too many projects — watch out for renamed or archived projects that were silently carrying useful work with this label attached.

Rebuilding trust in your filters

The worst part of breaking your filters isn’t the work to fix them. It’s that you stop trusting the system… and in a tool like Todoist, the system *is* the tool. If I see 0 tasks under a filter, I should be able to assume that actually means 0 tasks are relevant.

Once you lose trust in that, you start gut-checking everything.

You second-guess whether a task needs an extra label or a project heading.
You stop archiving things, because you want to see them in raw search.
You start adding `📌` or keyword prefixes like `ACTION:` or `DEBUG:` in your task name so you can find them textually instead of by metadata.

It’s exhausting.

Honestly the fix was just to slow down, revalidate one view at a time, and add comment fields to some of my core tasks. That way, if a label disappears, I still have an anchor or use-case written in plain text inside the task that reminds me what it was supposed to show up under.

Not perfect. But better than wondering why I feel so behind on things that were never visible to begin with.

Debugging automations that depend on filters

So many of my automations depend on labels to know what goes where:

– Zapier triggers that pull a Todoist task to send to Notion or Slack
– Make.com flows that archive tasks if the label is `@archivepending`
– Cron calendar events mapped from a filtered feed like `@meetingprep & today`

If a label breaks or is renamed, it is so hard to detect the problem because most errors don’t notify you. Zapier will just skip runs quietly, and your dashboard won’t flag that fewer tasks are running. Worse, your test run might still succeed if you test using a new label.

The only way I caught one of my Notion entries not syncing was because I noticed a similar task had shown up but another one hadn’t. No error log, no behavior change. Just absence.

I ended up writing a check Zap — it runs every few hours and searches Todoist for `@mustexist`, an intentionally fake label. If the search fails completely instead of returning empty, it lets me know that labels broke and filters died.

A more dramatic option is to set a real task like:

“Health Check: If you’re seeing this, your custom filter is working.”

And assign it a nonsensical label. If it vanishes, that means something upstream changed.

This isn’t elegant. But neither is accidentally working 3 hours on admin tasks while your `@deepfocus` filter sits empty and you blame yourself.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯