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How-Todo?

This write-up and the accompanying markdown-files are from 2020, outlining my original thoughts and vision amidst my studies as a Software Engineer.

In 2022 I added Org-Files to this repository, which outline a grander picture with more refined details.

Introduction

Months ago, I started my quest to refine task management. I was using Todoist at the time and wasn't satisfied. I barely trusted it anymore - it was lacking capabilities I wanted, such as a wait date as well as a difference between scheduled and due. Since it is a proprietary service, extending it would have been very challenging. I was also growing more accustomed and comfortable with the terminal and the UNIX philosophy.

So I started exploring the CLI task managers and found taskwarrior - it seemed the perfect tool at first glance, with great customizability and control. But it too turned out to have some fundamental flaws.

The Concept of Trust

I believe I first heard CGP Grey using this term, but I have not found it anywhere on the Internet with this meaning.

Trusting a digital tool, such as a task manager, means you rely on it. If you don't trust a tool, you will use it less and tend towards alternatives e.g. pen and paper. To build trust with a task manager, you need to put all your tasks in it and set it up in a way that fits your workflow.

For that, a task management system needs to enable these three actions:

  • quickly capture new information
  • planning & reviewing
  • retrieving tasks relevant to the current context

My problem is that I don't trust any of the systems I am currently using:

  • head: I forget things, short-term memory limited
  • paper: many slips flying around, can get lost easily
  • CLIs: too verbose to use, didn't get me the information I needed in time
  • web: too many clicks, too slow, not available offline, often unflexible

Design

The most important rule: Everything is a task. There is nothing else.

Projects, Areas, Epics - they can all be mapped onto tasks, and doing so will allow you to leverage the same toolset on everything. A project or epic is a completable task with subtasks - it can itself be a subtask.
To divide your task list into areas, simply put everything under uncompletable (see task type activity) root tasks.

With everything being a task, areas and projects can also have all kinds of tags and attributes. And then subtasks may inherit these attributes (particularly tags).

More fundamentals:

  • UNIX philosophy: use plain text is possible, separate into independent modules
  • Complete control: Inbuilt reports and attributes should use available configuration, so that the user can change fundamental parts of the system

Task types

There are essentially 4 types of things we do:

  • tasks: things to be done once e.g. hand in an assignment, fix a bug
  • activities: can't be completed e.g. browse the internet, gaming, spend time with family
  • habits: repeat in a set interval, e.g. go for a run daily, pay rent - sometimes skippable
  • chores: recur in regular intervals without a strict due date, e.g. do laundry, cut nails - can be postponed but not skipped

Even though they won't be clearly distinguished by a single property, they will be mapped through some default properties:

  • Inspired by tasklite, habits have a repeat property while chores have a recur property - both can be frozen.
  • Tasks and activities may be distinguished by a size property, where activities have a special size value of -, marking them incompletable. Alternatively, activities may be prefixed with a star as it is done in Todoist

These basic types also incorporate other types:

  • an area is simply an activity with subtasks
  • a project is a task with subtasks

Since "task" is one of these types, entities of any of these types can be called "items" within the implementation to avoid confusion.

User Stories

  • areas
  • housework projects
  • GTD
  • Agile

Reports I need

  • Review active projects
  • Find out tasks to batch when going out
  • Find things I can do when I am (outside watching the babies e.g. cut nails | focused, wanting to do some (writing|programming) in the morning | unfocused in the afternoon e.g. check mails | taking a break from work on the computer e.g. do laundry | eating/snacking something e.g. watch a video/read a paper | listening to an audiobook e.g. digging, hang out the laundry)

Inspirations

Taskwarrior

I have been using taskwarrior for a few weeks now, but I am already starting to lose trust again. I don't work on most of the tasks I've entered, and if I do, I rarely remember checking them off.

Issues

  • A big issue holding me back is a missing notion of subtasks. You either have to use projects, dependencies or create a complete custom hack - either a script or hook. This also makes entering tasks more verbose as I have to specify multiple tags repeatedly which could otherwise simply be inherited.
  • Recurrence is a longstanding issue, but can somewhat be solved by plugins: https://github.com/tbabej/task.shift-recurrence and https://github.com/JensErat/task-relative-recur
  • UDAs have a lot less options than inbuilt properties
  • CLI can be too verbose: I am missing some way to set shorthands for attributes, e.g. "p" for project, dates are rather inflexible
  • Keeping all reports aligned with custom attributes is a hassle, since you can't base reports off each other
  • ids change whenever a task is completed, so you constantly have double-check or might complete a wrong task

What it does well

  • Great customizability with reports, UDAs, DOM etc
  • Great extendability with hooks
  • Integrates with many tools (e.g. vimwiki, powerlevel10k, timewarrior)

Links

Discussions

Projects