87 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
87 lines
5.2 KiB
Markdown
Months ago, I started my quest to refine task management. I was using Todoist at the time and wasn't satisfied.
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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.
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I was also growing more accustomed and comfortable with the terminal and the UNIX philosophy.
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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.
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# The concept of trust
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I believe I first heard CGP Grey using this term, but I have not found it anywhere on the Internet with this meaning.
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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.
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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.
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For that, a task management system needs to enable these three actions:
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- quickly capture new information
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- planning & reviewing
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- retrieving tasks that should be done and can be done in the current context
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# Design
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The most important rule: Everything is a task. There is nothing else.
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Projects, Areas, Epics - they can all be mapped onto tasks, and doing so will allow you to leverage the same toolset on everything.
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A project or epic is a completable task with subtasks - it can itself be a subtask.
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If you want to divide your task list into areas, these can simply be uncompletable tasks at the root level.
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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).
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More fundamentals:
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- UNIX philosophy: use plain text is possible, separate into independent modules
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- Complete control: Inbuilt reports and attributes should use available configuration, so that the user can change fundamental parts of the system
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## Task types
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There are essentially 4 types of things we do:
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- tasks: things to be done once e.g. hand in an assignment, fix a bug
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- activities: can't be completed e.g. browse the internet, gaming, spend time with family
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- habits: repeat in a set interval, e.g. go for a run daily, pay rent - sometimes skippable
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- chores: recur in regular intervals without a strict due date, e.g. do laundry, cut nails - can be postponed but not skipped
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Even though they won't be clearly distinguished by a single property, they will be mapped through some default properties:
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- Inspired by [tasklite](https://tasklite.org/concepts.html), habits have a `repeat` property while chores have a `recur` property - both can be frozen.
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- 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
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These basic types also incorporate other types:
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- an area is simply an activity with subtasks
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- a project is a task with subtasks
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Since "task" is one of these types, entities of any of these types can be called "items" within the implementation to avoid confusion.
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## User Stories
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- areas
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- housework projects
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- GTD
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- Agile
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### Reports I need
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- Review active projects
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- Find out tasks to batch when going out
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- 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)
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# Inspirations
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## Taskwarrior
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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.
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### Issues
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- 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.
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- 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
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- UDAs have a lot less options than inbuilt properties
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- CLI can be too verbose: I am missing some way to set shorthands for attributes, e.g. "p" for project, dates are rather inflexible
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- Keeping all reports aligned with custom attributes is a hassle, since you can't base reports off each other
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- ids change whenever a task is completed, so you constantly have double-check or might complete a wrong task
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### What it does well
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- Great customizability with reports, UDAs, DOM etc
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- Great extendability with hooks
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- Integrates with many tools (e.g. vimwiki, powerlevel10k, timewarrior)
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# Links
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[taskwarrior]: https://taskwarrior.org/
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https://tasklite.org/related.html
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https://www.wired.com/2016/03/best-to-do-list-app/
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