Part Six: Special Situations · Chapter 20

Importing from Another System

If you're coming to ATEND from Todoist, Things, Apple Reminders, or another task manager, you can bring your data with you — but not all at once, and not without making decisions. Import in ATEND is a guided migration, not a bulk transfer. That distinction matters.

Why import comes after onboarding

Import is available from Settings → Import, but only after you've completed onboarding. It's deliberately not offered during the onboarding flow itself. This is a design choice, not an oversight.

Your first experience with ATEND should be building something new, not hauling in the weight of everything you've accumulated elsewhere. Importing before you understand the methodology produces overwhelm, not continuity.

Give ATEND a week first. Get familiar with how the inbox processes into tasks, how hats work, how the Launchpad surfaces what matters. Then import — because at that point you'll know what ATEND needs from your data and you'll make better decisions about what's worth bringing across.

What can be imported

Source	What comes across
Google Calendar Apple Calendar	Connected during onboarding. All future events sync continuously. Historical events from the past 90 days import as read-only records.
iOS / Android Contacts Google Contacts	Selective import — you search by name and choose who to bring in. Not a bulk dump. Each contact gets a relationship type and optional hat and role during import.
Todoist	Tasks, projects, and due dates. Goes through the guided migration flow.
Things 3	Tasks, projects, and areas. Goes through the guided migration flow.
Apple Reminders	Tasks with due dates. Goes through the guided migration flow.
CSV (generic)	Tasks with title and due date, or contacts with name, email, and phone. The fallback for any source not listed here.
Asana Notion	Tasks assigned to you (Asana) or via CSV export (Notion). Available but lower priority — expect some rough edges.

The guided migration — tasks and projects

When you import tasks from another system, the import screen opens with an honest assessment:

"You have 87 items from Todoist.
You don't need to process all of these — or ever. Many are probably stale.
For each one, you'll decide: is this still real?"

Items are presented one at a time, showing their original title, due date, and project name from the source system. For each one, four options:

Still real

Assign a hat and move on

Quick import. You tap a hat, and the item goes to the processing queue with hat assigned and everything else at sensible defaults. You'll fully process it later when it surfaces in the Launchpad.

Process now

Full setup immediately

The complete eight-field processing flow runs now — hat, energy, time estimate, who it serves, stakes, location, activation difficulty. Use this for items where you already know all the details.

Park it

Send to Someday

Real but not timely. Goes to Someday where it'll surface in the monthly review.

Let it go

Trash it

Gone. This is the right answer for more items than you might expect. Old tasks from a previous system carry a lot of accumulated guilt — letting them go is often the most honest thing.

A progress indicator shows where you are. You can stop at any point and tap "Come back to this later" — your session progress is saved and resumable from Settings → Import. Remaining unprocessed items stay in a pending import state.

When the session is complete, ATEND summarizes what happened in plain language: "You processed 47 items. 23 are in your processing queue for later. 17 were parked. You let go of 31 that didn't need to come with you. Good call. Fresh start."

Let go of more than you think. Most people who migrate from another task manager discover that 30–50% of their old tasks are genuinely stale — things they captured months ago that no longer matter, projects that quietly resolved, obligations that went away. The migration is an opportunity to audit that honestly rather than hauling the whole backlog forward.

Why there's no bulk import option

There's no "import everything as active tasks" button. This is intentional.

A task in ATEND needs a hat, an energy level, stakes, a time estimate, and a time_origin to function correctly in the Launchpad. Without those fields, the fit score algorithm has nothing to work with and the task will never surface. Tasks imported without processing would arrive as inert records — technically in the system, practically invisible.

This is why the guided migration exists. It's not slower for the sake of being slower. It's the process that makes imported data actually usable.

What doesn't import

—

Project structure. The hierarchy from your old system — nested projects, areas, tags — doesn't transfer. Source project names appear as context during the guided migration so you can use them to assign ATEND hats, but the old structure isn't recreated. You're building a new structure, not copying an old one.

—

Recurring task schedules. Recurring tasks from other systems arrive as regular one-time tasks. After import, you can open any of them and set up recurrence from the task detail view. Automatically mapping foreign recurrence formats to ATEND's template-and-instance architecture is too error-prone to do reliably.

—

Attachments and rich notes. Plain text in task notes imports. File attachments, embedded images, and rich formatting from other systems don't transfer — those stay in the source app if you need them.

—

Completion history. Only active (uncompleted) tasks are imported. Your completed task history from the old system stays there. ATEND's calibration and pattern data starts fresh from your first completed tasks in the new system.

Contact import

Contact import is separate from task import and available at any time from Settings → Import → Contacts. It's selective — you search by name and choose who to bring in. Not all of your device contacts belong in ATEND, and bulk importing creates noise rather than signal.

For each contact you import, you assign a relationship type and optionally a hat and role label. The system scans for birthday data in your device contacts and offers to create reminders for them automatically, one tap per person. It also checks your existing ATEND projects and offers to formalize any people you've named there as proper contacts.

Starting point for contact import

Begin with the people who already appear in your active tasks and projects — the ones ATEND is already tracking work against. Those are the contacts where context notes and cadence tracking will have immediate value. The rest can be added over time as those relationships naturally come up in your work.

A note on starting fresh

It's worth saying directly: you don't have to import anything. ATEND works perfectly well as a completely fresh start. If the idea of migrating your old task list feels like bringing your old problems with you, trust that instinct. The inbox is open and the system is ready.

Many people find that starting from zero — using ATEND only for new things that arise — is actually cleaner than migration. The old stuff either surfaces as something you need to do (and then you capture it in the inbox) or it doesn't (and then it wasn't real). The guided migration is there when you want it. It's not required.