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)

xeruf / nodal

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