Importing existing work

Importing Your Work into Herculean

You can import existing work into Herculean from task management platforms such as Trello, Jira, ClickUp and others. The easiest approach is often to let a connected AI agent, such as Codex, handle the migration for you.

Tasks, descriptions and other information are ultimately structured data that your AI agent can interpret and recreate as Herculean projects and tasks.

However, don’t expect a perfect one-to-one migration. Different platforms organise information differently, so some features will need translating.

For example:

• Labels: Existing labels can be imported, but Herculean supports labels with descriptions that explain their meaning to your AI agents. You’ll benefit from adding these.
• Tasks and descriptions: These can generally be transferred, although formatting and platform-specific features may need adjusting.
• Attachments: Herculean doesn’t accept file uploads. Existing attachments should remain in suitable external storage and be linked through Herculean Resources.
• Workflows: Complex status configurations may need simplifying to fit Herculean’s four workflow columns.

You can export your existing data, give it to a capable AI agent and ask it to organise the information into appropriate Herculean projects and tasks.

Before importing everything, consider a brain dump

There’s another approach I’d strongly recommend considering: start fresh with a brain dump.

Traditional task management systems have a habit of becoming graveyards for forgotten tasks, abandoned ambitions and things that stopped mattering months or years ago.

Importing everything risks bringing that clutter straight into your new productivity system.

Instead, have a conversation with your AI about what’s currently on your mind. Discuss your responsibilities, unfinished work, immediate concerns, priorities and ambitions.

Your agent can turn that conversation into organised Herculean projects and actionable tasks.

You can always import historical information later if it’s genuinely useful.

The goal isn’t to recreate your old task manager. It’s to build a better productivity system around what actually matters to you today.

Strategies for Importing Existing Work

Most mainstream task management platforms allow you to export your projects and tasks. Trello, for example, supports JSON exports, while Jira offers CSV exports.

These exports typically contain tasks, descriptions, labels, attachments and other project information. You can provide the exported data to your AI agent and ask it to prepare the information for Herculean.

Before importing, I’d recommend following a few practical steps.

1. Review and consolidate your labels

Ask your AI agent to identify which labels are actually used by tasks in your export.

Have it check for duplicates, redundant labels and anything whose purpose isn’t immediately obvious. Where clarification is needed, your agent should ask you what the label represents.

From there, create fresh Herculean labels with meaningful descriptions, importing only the labels you actually need rather than recreating unnecessary clutter.

2. Migrate attachments into Resources

Review any documents, attachments or external files associated with your exported tasks.

Where possible, identify their existing locations and convert them into Herculean Resources.

If files need migrating, have your AI agent organise and upload them to a suitable external storage service, such as Google Drive, before attaching the corresponding Resource links to your new Herculean tasks.

Don’t copy entire documents into task descriptions. Keep the files in external storage and use Resources to reference them.

3. Leave unnecessary history behind

Review tasks that have been archived, completed long ago or abandoned.

Consider whether there’s any real benefit in importing them. You probably don’t need years of completed or irrelevant work cluttering your new productivity system.

Focus on active commitments, useful documentation and tasks that still matter.

4. Don’t blindly translate platform-specific fields

Different productivity platforms use different concepts, and not everything has a direct equivalent in Herculean.

For example, story points should not be converted into Herculean Intensity values. They represent different measurements and shouldn’t be treated as interchangeable.

Ask your AI agent to identify fields that don’t translate cleanly and raise them for your review rather than making assumptions.

5. Import one project at a time

Treat each exported JSON or CSV file as a separate migration exercise.

Have your AI agent review the contents, propose the project structure, resolve labels and Resources, and identify anything requiring clarification before creating the new Herculean project and its tasks.

This keeps the migration manageable and gives you an opportunity to refine your approach before importing everything else.

6. Simplify and map your workflow columns

If your previous task management system uses a complicated workflow with numerous columns, ask your AI agent to map them to Herculean’s four default workflow columns: Backlog, In Progress, Review and Done.

You’ll often find that even complex workflows fit comfortably into these four stages without losing anything meaningful.

Where a column doesn’t map cleanly, investigate why. It may indicate that a task contains multiple separate activities that would be better managed as individual tasks.

Don’t automatically recreate the complexity of your old system. Use the migration as an opportunity to simplify how you work.