I'm not sure how I missed that. I've never heard of if hiTask! A friend pointed out Bullet Journal (http://bulletjournal.com/) too. I like the idea of having it all in your notebook but it does mean you have to carry it around everywhere.
I use one idea from bulletjournal regularly: Whenever I scribble down a note to do something later, I put a box before it. When it is done (done might simply mean scheduled into my real calender) I checkmark the box.
It is very easy to scan a page for boxes and it works everywhere. For example, on printed slides discussed in a meeting or a post-it from the refrigerator.
I'm not sure I understand your comment (I don't know what you mean by "limit work-in-progress") but one of the principles is to be explicit and formal about all the projects you've got going, as opposed to having fuzzy ideas about an unlimited number of potential projects in your head. When you track all of these projects, you adopt a more realistic approach, and you think more carefully about whether or not to start one.
I mean GTD got lots of things right (have an inbox, split tasks/tasks with deadlines/events), but it is missing the WIP limit from kanban which is very important.
I am not sure if I get you right, but what I have a problem with is that to-do list are, well, lists of deadlines. There is no representation of task being "in progress". This way, if you don't groom your list on a daily basis, you may end up having dozen of deadlines to face one day.
Yes, most todo apps today are not friendly to dateless tasks, and they conflate start / hide-until date with due date, which should be kept separate. I call this problem 'due date pollution'.
I think a user must be able to postpone a task without assigning a due date to it. I'm working on a todo app that will implement separate hide-until and due dates.
I number of years back, we were looking for a new activity tracking system at the company where it worked. (Meetings, papers, etc.) One of the things that became very obvious was that the decision was going to end up being very influenced by things like the nature of the activities, the degree to which it was important to track progress in an ongoing project, and what were the important attributes to record.
We actually ended up repurposing a bug tracking system (trac) because the price was right and it mostly fitted what we were trying to do. But a number of well-regarded project rtacking systems just didn't click with our needs.
I just end up using text files or written notes. Works both as a to do list and idea scratchpad. The only thing I'd want to change is be more organised about keeping the text files in sync (we can't use Dropbox at work, so I end up using emails).
I've heard good things about org mode in emacs, wonder what added value I'd get from that.
Org mode is amazing as a TODO list. As you've noticed, text files are really convenient for a variety of reasons. If you like emacs (I've been using evil mode recently), then it's pretty much the ideal user interface for outlining tasks and keeping track of them. Prioritisation is simply a matter of cut and paste. The visibility features of org mode make it very easy to keep track of a lot of items. It also has support for setting deadlines, time tracking and reporting.
It's worth spending an afternoon playing with it. There are a lot of features.
One thing you get from org mode is agendas. They are generated according to your specifications (e.g. "all tasks this week" or "all items tagged NEXT") from the clutter of a directory full of org files. I was never much into org mode until I found that I don't actually need to keep order as long as I just tag items.
iOS/OS X only, but OmniFocus has worked well for me in this regard. Synchronizes across devices, and scheduled tasks are visible in my calendar, and calendar events are visible to OmniFocus.
If I could use it on my work computer I'd be set (Windows and Linux environment).
Shameless plug: Try Priority Matrix at https://appfluence.com and see what you think. Many of our customers have been looking for a replacement to their FP for years and they're ecstatic that they found us, if I may say so myself.
I'm using Trello every day, but I don't like that it is too manual. It's like a physical board. There are no options to automate certain things, especially task order and recurrence. I spend too much time maintaining correct order to avoid important tasks moving out of sight.
My ideal system would do the ordering for me, according to the priority, date, postpone hints, and other task properties.
I like Trello primarily because of the fact that it forces some manual intervention on your part: 1) it forces and motivates you to complete tasks 2) the act of moving things, or checking things off provides a healthy boost on progress ( real or not ).
As for the recurrence part, there is a way to do that through Trello. I create cards and entire boards for recurring tasks that I have to do each iteration, when that iteration begins I just use the "Copy list.." and copy it to the new board and Bam a whole new set of tasks to check off.
GTD is a system that each one should 'distill and blend' according his own view of the world. Somehow the blog author 'distills' GTD towards personal development. By the other hand, my 'distillation' is more generalist. If it helps somebody:
For work:
Outlook Tasks list on the right hand pane
Killer features:
- Single click to flag any email as a task
- Drag and Drop to reorder
- Set custom date/time folow up reminders
For personal life:
For things with no deadline - A gmail thread with my wife where we just keep "replying all"; For things with dates / deadlines - A Shared google calendar with my wife
I think what makes Outlook Tasks list work for you is the fact that it's there in-your-face all the time, already embedded into the mail app you use.
This little step of saving you the need to open a different app in a different window makes the real difference for most people.
Actually, this was the main reason I've used Sortd & Yanado (highly recommended) a while.
This is why one of my four monitors at work has emacs w/ org-mode up. Its omnipresence makes it easier to work into my daily workflow. But most folks don't end up with 4 monitors. This setup doesn't work as well on my home laptop since I don't have the space to dedicate to this.
Most todos are meant to be recorded and discarded. They are just a psychological mechanism to cope with the anxiety of an overly complex world. The todo-list of an average home-maker today would be more complex than that of the princes from a few centuries ago. My todo lists are fluid. I keep them in a big text file, tag them with a date, and keep them there. Once something is recorded, it is off my mind. I'll keep coming back to this file once every while, and realize that most things I recorded are no longer important. There is no one canonical todo list; just an almost immutable archive of lists that I recorded over the years.
The todo-mania is not any different than the bookmarking OCD or the million-open-tabs infestation. There are only so many moments in a lifetime, and just so much you can and should do. The important ones would come back to you, and for the rest, there is always the todo list.
(Of course professional todos are a different matter - they go into a ticketing system and are meant to be done.)
> They are just a psychological mechanism to cope with the anxiety of an overly complex world.
I'm not sure I agree with you there. Sure the world is complex, but then again so are we. Todo lists allow you to see the bigger picture, as the act of writing down your todo/idea makes you invest time in thinking about it coherently and logically as you convert it to English words on paper. Once you have a list going, you can prioritize it by any means (ease to complete, upcoming events it's needed for etc) and then at least you know that if you were to complete the list in order, then you will achieve your goals/meet deadlines etc.
It's that safety of 'knowing' a path through the unknowns in your future that makes writing a list worthwhile.
I wasn't making a value judgement on complexity. That can't be helped. And yes, writing clarifies, and todo lists are a great way of mapping an uncertain future and reducing anxiety.
I've given up chasing the software solution and realised that a paper to do list (managed in a Filofax) is the optimal for me. Most of my tasks come my way through face to face discussion so there's no email to convert to a task etc. And if it can't be taken off the list this week then it's probably a project that needs diarying.
I do use Outlook for diary management but that's because I work in a corporate environment and trying to do anything else would be working against the system. But it's one calendar for everything (work and personal).
Paper works for me, too. I get intense cathartic satisfaction in drawing my checkboxes (with drop shadows)--my co-workers make fun of me.* There's value in not only having a to-do list, but re-writing it from time-to-time.
I've tried multiple software applications, from plain text, to trello, to custom software. Nothing works as well.
* This actually serves another purpose as well: in a page full of notes, my drop-shadowed action items pop out.
I've tried many TODO apps, and apart from my Inbox being a (small) TODO list, I just maintain a tmux window called "notes", and it's literally a large file I type into via vim daily.
I never remove notes, I just add a new header for each note I need to take. These notes are eventually moved into actionable items (Trello is good for this), or if the task is quick and small, I maintain a generic "TODO" at the top of the file and delete that line item when the task is complete.
Keeping it simple just means I don't think about it, and actually get shit done.
I haven't found a decent ToDo list with this killer feature: dependencies.
I want to mark a task as dependant on another being done.
I want to add time estimates to those tasks, and see a gantt chart. I want tasks to show the sum of their dependencies estimates next to their own estimates.
I want priorities to also flow through dependency chains in this manner - if a high priority task is dependant on a low priority task, the low priority task inherits the high priority while that relationship exists. If a deadline of 7pm exists on one task, and it has a dependant task with an estimate of 1hr, that dependency will inherit a deadline of 6pm.
This is key for any ADDers - chains of dependencies to ensure that not only raisins are picked off your ToDo List and you get to only see next steps and not all steps.
For the past three years I have been working on this in an app sideproject and planned to launch the beta this winter, but I keep getting distracted :) Android alpha testers can get in touch with me.
taskwarrior also does this. In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I can't see the chain of dependencies; it only shows the next item and prioritizes accordingly.
Yeah, with some TODO managers I've used, the routine was to label things by how frequently I should check them. I ended up re-visiting a lot of things unnecessarily. I was always afraid of a task slipping through the net.
Good search functionality helps, but so does useful metadata attached to tasks to search on i.e. which tasks haven't I looked at in 3 months.
You are going beyond To Do Lists and stepping into full project management systems. I suppose there would be nothing stopping you from using PM software as a to do list... you would just need to focus your searches on "Project Management", because that is the feature set you are describing.
I realized I was heading down that path, and just went full into. I use https://kanboard.net/ to manage a couple todo lists (projects) like upcoming purchases, bills, chores. It's worked out amazing so far.
But I find all tasks to be done, face these constraints, and need to be managed in this way.
PM software tends to include other stuff - like team management, SLA considerations etc. dependencies should be part of any task management system IMHO.
I think you might be blurring the lines between task management and to do lists.
To do lists are what the name implies, a list of things to do.
Once you start adding things like dependencies, etc. to a to do list, it's not really a to do list any more.
If you are going to be that detailed about how you do your tasks, then a traditional Project Management tool (like Microsoft Project) is probably what you need.
Sure it's going to have some extra features you don't want, but nothing is forcing you to use those features, especially if the task management part satisfies your primary needs for dependency tracking, estimate/deadline rollups, etc.
Lots of applications are really full featured databases with a simplifying user interface to suit a particular use case. I think a good Todo list could and should be the same - with both a simple Todo use case supported while also able to become more full featured (I would like something able to handle "getting things done" style planning. But why not be able to scale to full-on project management? It could be made pluggable.)
Before I can have friends to dinner, I need to buy the ingredients, but before I buy the ingredients it would be good to print the recipes so I don't need to go back to the store. Also, I need to clean the dining room a bit which involves moving the elephant out of the room and into the garage.
Two little streams with deadlines: move elephant, print recipes today.
I worked on an app like this for a while as well, just arranging everything graphically, but abandoned it as too idiosyncratic....
For this problem, Getting Things Done says you should only record the next task. The second doesn't interest you as you only need to think about it once you're done with the first.
Work projects have multiple dependencies because they involve often many people, but Agile has been also pushing backward the desire to plan too much in advance.
The problem (crap, way late to post, sorry) is that you may record the task "Have friends for dinner". THEN you start working backwards on the dependency chain. It's a natural way to break down problems (why am I shopping for food if I don't know what I'm shopping for?). Shopping for my weeknight dinners is different than shopping for my Saturday night party (literally different tasks if they're time separated).
So the desire is to be able to record a target task, and obscure it (so to speak) behind the preparatory tasks. This is where projects and other things come into play. Project: Make a journal for my sister's wedding anniversary. Tasks: Purchase materials, assemble, hire artist friend to produce neat drawing on cover, distribute for signing by family (both sides). Those end up becoming ordered in some fashion (purchase materials, then the rest), or running in parallel (hire the artist friend and paste it into the produced journal, send out a single sewn signature to family and sew it into the final product, assemble the rest and wait). If you've only recorded the task "purchase materials" you don't have a concept of what follows it (and it remains in your head). This doesn't mean you need to see the following tasks, yet (software can hand them behind the tasks they depend on or by date or similar). But recording them is not a problem.
Once I made a todo list web app with tons of excel like features and unlimited hierarchy and could do any kind of automation with it with built in python script subset. Could be even used as database for other apps. Ultimately features pile on. It gets Harder to maintain, nobody really bought the concept. ( imagine seeing excel for the first time. ) had to give up ultimately. Guess I should clean up and open source it for the interested.
> Guess I should clean up and open source it for the interested.
I'd definitely be interested, at least in some screenshots to see what you mean by having both excel-like features and hierarchy. It sounds somewhat similar to Smartsheet[1], are you familiar?
Have not heard about smart sheet, but this was something like hierarchical comment thread, with parents have all knowledge about only immediate children. Change propagates along with calculations only higher in hierarchy. I am not at my desk right now but will send screenshots as well as videos once I do.
Actually, Just found a thoughtstream item I dumped a bunch of Todo list manager features I'd like to see, obviously I've thought too much about this o_o;
> time decriptions; 'in an hour', 'every tuesday', 'third day of each week every third month of a leap year', 'within a day of easter, midnight' - some of these might be impossible/impractical - but make it easy to specify a date concept.
Sounds like you're looking for many of the same things as I am. I tried all the usual suspects (including Trello, per the article), and none did what I wanted. I have actually been using Jira for personal task management for the past 6 months or so. It's pretty good, but it's Jira: slow, too many features, etc. It's still better than anything else I've tried.
Beyond that, we need opportunity tracking. Often, there is a very small window in progress can be made on a task. It could be an unique event, a recurring event, a time of day, access to a resource, etc.
- Buy milk when you're near milk
- Talk to John when you're near John
- Tan when they sun is bright
- Catch the train in the next 5 minutes otherwise you'll wait an hour for the next
You can't make a cake if you never have all the ingredients together at once. Synchronization is extremely important. Your basic to-do list lacks the awareness of the world to make you and others more productive.
This is a general problem that deserves a general solution.
It's be interesting for a company like google to tackle this, e.g.
"Your Todo item suggests you are wanting to bake a cake soon? You hovered over a cake recipe using vanilla pods. The store nearby stocks Foo brand vanilla pods for $12..."
Most likely, you just want a cake and don't care to bake it.
A big obstacle to collaboration and global productivity is the assumption that it is cheaper/better to make something yourself rather than purchase it. It couldn't be further from the truth. An expert baker will bake cheaper and better cakes than I ever could.
> Maybe a little too complex though ;-D
It is more important than it is complex. Humanity has waited long enough, it's time we take that step.
A lot of us enjoy the process: it's fun baking the cake, making the robot, playing with the laser cutter. That's what hacking encompasses -- the play, not just the end product.
And most expert bakers around here don't make the kinds of cakes I like. Way cheaper/better to whip one up in 20 minutes than spend hours trying to find a catering service that will use the right recipe (or an improvement) and then someone who will deliver it. The recipe: http://www.thevintagemixer.com/2013/03/tarta-de-santiago-rec...
> An expert baker will bake cheaper and better cakes than I ever could.
An expert baker can bake better and (possibly) cheaper cakes, but it is not necessarily in his or her interest to do so. It may be more practical to make the worst cakes that will sell, and then sell them for as much as the market can bear. (For example, McDonald's employs expert chefs.)
I'm working on a todo app that will address this via automatically-activated contexts. For example, you could have a task which has "@work & @near:Bob" in its Contexts field, and it will appear in your list when the both conditions are met.
(The app currently has all the infrastructure for such contexts, however I'm not yet sure about how to implement person proximity triggers in particular).
Another feature I've found lacking is that most todo / project management systems are all based around "work hours", and the assumption that you can count on every resource reliably putting in 40 hours per week.
Personal projects look nothing like that. This week I might have 2 hours for it, next week maybe zero hours.
I'm obsessed with task management. I have read Getting Things Done many times. I've used a lot (~50) of different task management systems over the years, and haven't found one that's good enough.
Todo lists and task management software won't ever solve the problem. The problem has to do with the way the system works, how the society is modeled. The application paradigm (where we have disconnected apps that do few things well) is the root cause.
It should be obvious that the solution is to change the UX of software as a whole. Get rid of the silly WIMP paradigm, and move to a more task-oriented one. Make the OS your task management system, and let apps (now semantic agents) help you achieve them.
What we lack is breakthroughs in language. We need a better semantic model to describe and model expected outcomes.
Yeah there's my problem. I've heard wonderful things about orgmode, to the point that people think it's worth switching. But I'm a vim user and I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble. Trying to get a variety of opinions.
I just switched from vim to emacs for org-mode. I use evil and the key mappings are very, very close. Give it a shot. It's really good. eLisp is kind of fun to play around with, I already grok that better than the vim language.
A couple perks of the switch: org-mode, magit (wrapper for git), elisp is kind of fun and makes customizing emacs really approachable (subjective of course), I used to live in the commandline (bash, tmux, vim) but I've found that I navigate my system faster and better than before (buffers and registers).
There's a steep learning curve, but being willing to read documentation is helpful. It's definitely been worth it for me. And I do think that conceptually thinking of emacs as an OS or interface to your computer rather than a text editor is helpful.
I've tried every to-do product out there - none worked for me. The best method I've found is to actually schedule time in my calendar to work on different projects. I find if I don't block out time to actually work on them, they don't get done.
Does anyone know of a to-do list manager that works this way? I ask because while I like this method, it is difficult to see all your to-dos or deal with a to-do that has multiple steps.
Todoist kept losing my todo items when they were stacked below each other in a two-level hierarchy (it might have been a keyboard shortcut or an error on my side -- we've ran through this with their customer service without any luck, but that's not the point).
With my broken Todoist I've avoided creating multi-level items and eventually cleaned up the list with this one question: is this task something I'm actually going to do?
If the answer is yes, then it goes to the list.
If not, then I discard it right away.
It's surprising how much of an anxiety relief this is. Todo apps tend to offer ways too many options, which makes you use them as backlogs or even notebooks. In my case, all those items were actionable - I've read GTD too -, the items just weren't important enough at most times. Now I get rid of the unimportant items on-the-fly.
We're sorry to hear your issue hasn't been solved after contacting our support team. Safety of user data is our priority #1! Could you please let me know if you're still experiencing any problem with Todoist and we'll be happy to help you either here or at http://support.todoist.com/.
Todoist support was awesome, but after about a month of investigation the ultimate solution for me was to stop using stacked items -- since I have none of those, the problem doesn't exist either, and I can keep using Todoist (as I've been, for 6+ years).
Suprised nobody has mentionned taskwarrior[1] yet! Its very flexible and can even be kept on a server. For example I've got it set up so giving it a link automatically puts in the pages title as a description and puts it in my reading list.
I prefer paper todo lists, but to actually move the needle I write down my 3-5 highest leverage activities and do one at a time. I cross them off as I finish them and at the end of the day I tear out the page and throw it away.
There was no great notebook out there for this, so my biz partner and I designed our own. We are selling them on Amazon because we have day jobs and don't have time to mess with fulfilling orders. You can see them here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZGE1914/
I have tried a few tools for to-do lists, but settled on 3 folders in my inbox: ACTION, READ & WANT.
I created some rules: subject beginning TODO goes to ACTION, subject beginning READ goes to READ, subject beginning WANT goes to WANT folder. This means I can add to any list just by sending a mail to myself.
I created additional rules so all emails from credit card companies, banks, accountant and other important senders goes straight into ACTION folder.
I try and ensure all unread items are dealt with daily. If I set it to read, it becomes non-urgent.
I was using a google doc for my task list / bug tracker at a previous job. Then we got Jira involved. No one bothered to fill it in properly, so it was more hassle than it was worth. Actually it was way more hassle then the google doc and far less flexible.
127 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadIt is very easy to scan a page for boxes and it works everywhere. For example, on printed slides discussed in a meeting or a post-it from the refrigerator.
I think a user must be able to postpone a task without assigning a due date to it. I'm working on a todo app that will implement separate hide-until and due dates.
I'm glad you found that Trello works well for you, but that doesn't mean everyone else's search will end in the same place.
We actually ended up repurposing a bug tracking system (trac) because the price was right and it mostly fitted what we were trying to do. But a number of well-regarded project rtacking systems just didn't click with our needs.
I've heard good things about org mode in emacs, wonder what added value I'd get from that.
It's worth spending an afternoon playing with it. There are a lot of features.
I'm using org mode to implement some form of GTD.
I've tried Google calendar reminders, and that hasn't worked. Evernote hasn't been great either. I don't want to go back to Notepad.
Maybe the issue is having the discipline to spend 15 minutes a day planning?
My intuition is that there should be something similar on a smartphone.
If I could use it on my work computer I'd be set (Windows and Linux environment).
My ideal system would do the ordering for me, according to the priority, date, postpone hints, and other task properties.
As for the recurrence part, there is a way to do that through Trello. I create cards and entire boards for recurring tasks that I have to do each iteration, when that iteration begins I just use the "Copy list.." and copy it to the new board and Bam a whole new set of tasks to check off.
https://github.com/eniomauro/hamster-gtd
http://gtgnome.net/
For work: Outlook Tasks list on the right hand pane
Killer features:
- Single click to flag any email as a task
- Drag and Drop to reorder
- Set custom date/time folow up reminders
For personal life: For things with no deadline - A gmail thread with my wife where we just keep "replying all"; For things with dates / deadlines - A Shared google calendar with my wife
I guess its a highly personal choice...
Actually, this was the main reason I've used Sortd & Yanado (highly recommended) a while.
The todo-mania is not any different than the bookmarking OCD or the million-open-tabs infestation. There are only so many moments in a lifetime, and just so much you can and should do. The important ones would come back to you, and for the rest, there is always the todo list.
(Of course professional todos are a different matter - they go into a ticketing system and are meant to be done.)
I'm not sure I agree with you there. Sure the world is complex, but then again so are we. Todo lists allow you to see the bigger picture, as the act of writing down your todo/idea makes you invest time in thinking about it coherently and logically as you convert it to English words on paper. Once you have a list going, you can prioritize it by any means (ease to complete, upcoming events it's needed for etc) and then at least you know that if you were to complete the list in order, then you will achieve your goals/meet deadlines etc.
It's that safety of 'knowing' a path through the unknowns in your future that makes writing a list worthwhile.
Well yes, they had other people to manage their todos :)
I do use Outlook for diary management but that's because I work in a corporate environment and trying to do anything else would be working against the system. But it's one calendar for everything (work and personal).
I've tried multiple software applications, from plain text, to trello, to custom software. Nothing works as well.
* This actually serves another purpose as well: in a page full of notes, my drop-shadowed action items pop out.
I never remove notes, I just add a new header for each note I need to take. These notes are eventually moved into actionable items (Trello is good for this), or if the task is quick and small, I maintain a generic "TODO" at the top of the file and delete that line item when the task is complete.
Keeping it simple just means I don't think about it, and actually get shit done.
I want to mark a task as dependant on another being done.
I want to add time estimates to those tasks, and see a gantt chart. I want tasks to show the sum of their dependencies estimates next to their own estimates.
I want priorities to also flow through dependency chains in this manner - if a high priority task is dependant on a low priority task, the low priority task inherits the high priority while that relationship exists. If a deadline of 7pm exists on one task, and it has a dependant task with an estimate of 1hr, that dependency will inherit a deadline of 6pm.
Good search functionality helps, but so does useful metadata attached to tasks to search on i.e. which tasks haven't I looked at in 3 months.
PM software tends to include other stuff - like team management, SLA considerations etc. dependencies should be part of any task management system IMHO.
To do lists are what the name implies, a list of things to do.
Once you start adding things like dependencies, etc. to a to do list, it's not really a to do list any more.
If you are going to be that detailed about how you do your tasks, then a traditional Project Management tool (like Microsoft Project) is probably what you need.
Sure it's going to have some extra features you don't want, but nothing is forcing you to use those features, especially if the task management part satisfies your primary needs for dependency tracking, estimate/deadline rollups, etc.
Before I can have friends to dinner, I need to buy the ingredients, but before I buy the ingredients it would be good to print the recipes so I don't need to go back to the store. Also, I need to clean the dining room a bit which involves moving the elephant out of the room and into the garage.
Two little streams with deadlines: move elephant, print recipes today.
I worked on an app like this for a while as well, just arranging everything graphically, but abandoned it as too idiosyncratic....
Work projects have multiple dependencies because they involve often many people, but Agile has been also pushing backward the desire to plan too much in advance.
So the desire is to be able to record a target task, and obscure it (so to speak) behind the preparatory tasks. This is where projects and other things come into play. Project: Make a journal for my sister's wedding anniversary. Tasks: Purchase materials, assemble, hire artist friend to produce neat drawing on cover, distribute for signing by family (both sides). Those end up becoming ordered in some fashion (purchase materials, then the rest), or running in parallel (hire the artist friend and paste it into the produced journal, send out a single sewn signature to family and sew it into the final product, assemble the rest and wait). If you've only recorded the task "purchase materials" you don't have a concept of what follows it (and it remains in your head). This doesn't mean you need to see the following tasks, yet (software can hand them behind the tasks they depend on or by date or similar). But recording them is not a problem.
I'd definitely be interested, at least in some screenshots to see what you mean by having both excel-like features and hierarchy. It sounds somewhat similar to Smartsheet[1], are you familiar?
[1] https://www.smartsheet.com/
Sweet! Thanks for following up, I'll keep an eye on this thread.
Not sure about the priority thing though.
> It's a new take on a to-do list focused around dependencies and a hierarchy.
https://thoughtstreams.io/Chris2048/design-ideas/5907/
Fantastical does this.
Beyond that, we need opportunity tracking. Often, there is a very small window in progress can be made on a task. It could be an unique event, a recurring event, a time of day, access to a resource, etc.
- Buy milk when you're near milk - Talk to John when you're near John - Tan when they sun is bright - Catch the train in the next 5 minutes otherwise you'll wait an hour for the next
You can't make a cake if you never have all the ingredients together at once. Synchronization is extremely important. Your basic to-do list lacks the awareness of the world to make you and others more productive.
This is a general problem that deserves a general solution.
"Your Todo item suggests you are wanting to bake a cake soon? You hovered over a cake recipe using vanilla pods. The store nearby stocks Foo brand vanilla pods for $12..."
Maybe a little too complex though ;-D
A big obstacle to collaboration and global productivity is the assumption that it is cheaper/better to make something yourself rather than purchase it. It couldn't be further from the truth. An expert baker will bake cheaper and better cakes than I ever could.
> Maybe a little too complex though ;-D
It is more important than it is complex. Humanity has waited long enough, it's time we take that step.
And most expert bakers around here don't make the kinds of cakes I like. Way cheaper/better to whip one up in 20 minutes than spend hours trying to find a catering service that will use the right recipe (or an improvement) and then someone who will deliver it. The recipe: http://www.thevintagemixer.com/2013/03/tarta-de-santiago-rec...
An expert baker can bake better and (possibly) cheaper cakes, but it is not necessarily in his or her interest to do so. It may be more practical to make the worst cakes that will sell, and then sell them for as much as the market can bear. (For example, McDonald's employs expert chefs.)
(The app currently has all the infrastructure for such contexts, however I'm not yet sure about how to implement person proximity triggers in particular).
Personal projects look nothing like that. This week I might have 2 hours for it, next week maybe zero hours.
Todo lists and task management software won't ever solve the problem. The problem has to do with the way the system works, how the society is modeled. The application paradigm (where we have disconnected apps that do few things well) is the root cause.
It should be obvious that the solution is to change the UX of software as a whole. Get rid of the silly WIMP paradigm, and move to a more task-oriented one. Make the OS your task management system, and let apps (now semantic agents) help you achieve them.
What we lack is breakthroughs in language. We need a better semantic model to describe and model expected outcomes.
Can anyone who is more familiar with orgmode describe how it might play this role?
> Can anyone who is more familiar with orgmode describe how it might play this role?
Emacs, full screen (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FullScreen), auto-starting org-mode, and do everything you can in it (http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-em...). It helps if you already use Emacs, such as writing software in it.
A couple perks of the switch: org-mode, magit (wrapper for git), elisp is kind of fun and makes customizing emacs really approachable (subjective of course), I used to live in the commandline (bash, tmux, vim) but I've found that I navigate my system faster and better than before (buffers and registers).
There's a steep learning curve, but being willing to read documentation is helpful. It's definitely been worth it for me. And I do think that conceptually thinking of emacs as an OS or interface to your computer rather than a text editor is helpful.
Does anyone know of a to-do list manager that works this way? I ask because while I like this method, it is difficult to see all your to-dos or deal with a to-do that has multiple steps.
With my broken Todoist I've avoided creating multi-level items and eventually cleaned up the list with this one question: is this task something I'm actually going to do?
If the answer is yes, then it goes to the list.
If not, then I discard it right away.
It's surprising how much of an anxiety relief this is. Todo apps tend to offer ways too many options, which makes you use them as backlogs or even notebooks. In my case, all those items were actionable - I've read GTD too -, the items just weren't important enough at most times. Now I get rid of the unimportant items on-the-fly.
1. https://taskwarrior.org/
There was no great notebook out there for this, so my biz partner and I designed our own. We are selling them on Amazon because we have day jobs and don't have time to mess with fulfilling orders. You can see them here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZGE1914/
For me, it's the perfect todo list.
I created some rules: subject beginning TODO goes to ACTION, subject beginning READ goes to READ, subject beginning WANT goes to WANT folder. This means I can add to any list just by sending a mail to myself.
I created additional rules so all emails from credit card companies, banks, accountant and other important senders goes straight into ACTION folder.
I try and ensure all unread items are dealt with daily. If I set it to read, it becomes non-urgent.