Ask HN: Recommendations for tool to manage optional tasks?

3 points by grammernerd ↗ HN
Hi, I'm starting to think about an approach to minimal documentation/tracking of tasks when tackling software work and I'm curious about any tools that might make this easier.

The core concept would be something like a checklist manager where each thing you want to get done (let's call that a workItem) gets a consistent checklist of tasks.

Each of the tasks must be addressed in some way, either by completing the task OR by stating why you're not going to complete the task.

The workItem should contain a minimal record of the work done and choices made.

e.g. one task might be ROI Assessment - For some features this might be a formal document with assumptions, for a bug it might be very cursory. For something like a piece of work related to compliance it might be totally irrelevant.

The point is that no one forgets it, or assumes that it's unnecessary. The decision to do or not do something is always taken positively and transparently.

I guess this could be hacked into any number of management tools, I was just interested if anyone had heard of something purpose built like this or a system that favors this approach?

thx

1 comment

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I quess a lot of existing tools allow to do the same or something similar. For example, Riter (https://riter.co). It requires minimal efforts to create any task - you just need to specify its title, other parameters are optional. When necessary, you are able to add something else to the tasks - topics (tags like bug, feature, backend and others), description, todos, comments etc. Each task has a state (in progress, estimated, done and so on). In future you will be able to add your own set of states (maybe "debug", "checking" or what you need).