Show HN: General Task, a free task manager for builders (beta) (generaltask.com)
We aim to be the best place where one can find what’s next in their workday and we integrate with a number of different services to help do that. We’re still in the early stages of a beta, but so far you can:
- Create/edit tasks with due dates, priorities, and folders
- Drag tasks onto your calendar to block off time to do them (syncs with GCal)
- Sync with Linear (JIRA coming soon) to see tasks assigned to you
- Sync with Github to see your PRs
- Integrate with Slack to make tasks directly from Slack
What sets us apart?
We know there are tons of task managers out there. We believe ours is different because it is tailor-made for engineers, with integrations for Github PRs, Linear and Slack. We also support dragging tasks onto your calendar, which is usually only found in premium paid products, while our consumer product is free and always will be.
Our mission is to make knowledge workers more productive, and we believe the best way to do that is by focusing on software engineers and achieving mass adoption of a free consumer product before releasing a paid product for businesses.
Let us know what you think!
NOTE: We currently only support Google sign-in, sorry about that! We will be adding more login options soon. If you don't want to sign in with Google, you can see a quick 1 minute demo of our features here: https://youtu.be/NUOIH2On_Nw
87 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadEdit: it's fixed now
Please fix the back-hijack to HN though. (it's like forwarding twice for some reason)
edit: I see you're aware of it!
Edit: it's fixed now
Edit: it's fixed now
Any plans to extend the Github integration to Issues in addition to PRs?
Best of luck to you as it looks like you've got a great start.
Congrats on the launch, thanks for the response
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32313583
" 9 points by dchuk 3 months ago | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: Show HN: Emery – Personal productivity workspace
I’ve tried a lot of apps like this over the years. Two main things I’ve struggled with with all of them:
1) none seem to handle multiple calendars well. I have a personal calendar, a work calendar, and a side project calendar, I want them all to be independent, have tasks blocked out on them, etc, but still be aware of each other. So for example, I want to schedule a doctor’s appointment on my personal and have my other calendars mirror that time block, but scrub the details/make it generic. Super specific idea obviously, but if I don’t have it I have so much manual overhead aligning everything that I just give up and do it by hand.
2) they are all dogshit slow (not sure about this one, haven’t tried it). The combo of electron apps and what I guess is just calendar synchronization latency makes them have surprise ux patterns and overall just shitty experience in general.
A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.
Last: my notes live separately (as most people’s do I’ve seen anecdotally).
I hope someone can really succeed in this space because time blocking is so powerful, but nothing has fit my lifestyle quite right yet unfortunately."
If you want an advisor of some sort who is a career product leader, does sales now, has an insane schedule, and is also a father of a young kid so has a crazy personal life, I’m your guy. My Twitter handle is in my profile here.
When I see responses like this, instinctively my internal reaction is: "Okay, so they don't have this and say they're working on improvements, but I don't know how effectively they build new features or when this might be released. Will it be a week? A month? 6 months?"
I don't know the best solution, but having some more information to answer this would keep me more engaged with products that are being actively developed. I don't want to get bought in to something that iterates at a snails pace, but I could commit myself to trying tools that rapidly iterate and improve..
Go read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction...
It's hands down the best approach to roadmapping out there.
The tl;dr:
Commit to Outcomes (future states of the world your product can create that don't exist today, and have meaning for your customers) without committing to solving for those Outcomes in any particular way.
So something like "It's easy for customers to get their data out of the product to feed into other applications" is an Outcome, and the Outputs can be all sorts of things: APIs, Direct Integrations to Other Apps, Excel exports, or just a dumb form for them to request the data and you have a SQL script you run to do it because it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment.
Well said. I pay for Trello premium solely for the scheduled checklist feature, but it’s clear that this is not a top priority for them to flesh out as you described.
I would love to find a service that combined Trello’s kanbans with Microsoft Todo and offered a tight mobile integration for reminders and widgets and the like.
I feel exactly the same, and haven't been able to figure out how to make it work using any combination of Notion, Todoist or Trello.
Todoist with project sub-groups of "backlog", "in-progress", "blocked" and "recurring" is about the best I've managed, but I think I've just gotten too habituated to giving every task a date and managing things from the "upcoming/this week" view. Making better use of sub-tasks might help, but then you end up needing to have a kanban board within a task for managing the sub-tasks...
But I can't see any info on pricing? I see "free to start!" but always worried about roach motel business models - esp since the TOS is soooo detailed this doesn't seem like a happy hacker side project? Am I the product, or just too cynical nowadays?
update: after reg i see:
> That means we will be keeping our personal productivity solution free forever.
so i guess that means you're banking on a 2B version later?
One thing I like about Linear is having multiple accounts/workspaces and easily switching between them. As someone who manages multiple Gmail accounts and projects, this would be a nice feature. Totally understandable why it's not in the beta, though.
What's the best way to report issues once this thread has gone stale?
And I've also found that focusing too much on small details can cause you to miss big picture work that has much more effect. For example, you optimize preparing for a meeting, but you don't stop to think "maybe I don't even need this meeting?". Or you have very detailed implementation for some feature, but you don't think about maybe a different feature would be more valuable.
I have been casually thinking of what a task management solution that encourages more spontaneous and creative work would look like.
We wanted to start by doing the fundamentals very well (tasks, basic calendar, etc), but we are very excited to push the envelope of what a task manager does over time and help align your short term actions with what can most effectively advance your goals in the long run.
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Mentioned apps with how they handle your data:
• [General Task](https://try.generaltask.com/) – free, proprietary § ???
• [Emery](https://emery.to/) – $7/month, proprietary § Data lives on their server, when your subscription expires your account goes into read-only mode and can still view your data
• [Atomic](https://www.atomiclife.app/) – free tier, proprietary § ???
Why? How often does anyone do anything with the data they've exported from some service?
Maybe it's just me. But I feel like starting over setting up all your to-do tasks and what-not is going to take less time then writing some script to parse data from one format and upload it to some new system. Especially given that there will be a delta in featuresets.
Similar for notes and todo apps. I like to pull my data in, analyze it, visualize it, convert it to other formats, etc
Even when I don't yet have specific plans for my data I like to know I can pull it in and make local backups