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Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

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Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#61

Post by yodon »

reacharavindh wrote: post #8

I tried this as well. I'm yearning for a tool that lets me drag & drop an email, and it automatically creates a task based on the content. I can obviously go and edit it after setting deadline or assign to project etc. I was hoping to create this workflow with MS Outlook(on Mac) and its inbuilt Tasks, but apparently they don't support it :-( I would pay for such a feature.

I’ve done a non-trivial amount of research around this in connection with office graph and outlook addins. The trick is you need to be able to get back to the original email in its thread from the task, so you can retain context and reply or extend the context as needed while still tracking it as a task. All the implementations I’ve found on the outlook side loose that connection (I think gmail tasks let you retain it but I sadly prefer outlook to gmail)

[Edit to add] almost forgot the key piece, which is that I think it’s possible to retain that context but I haven’t quite been able to justify the time to actually complete the round tripping code.

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#62

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

insensible wrote: post #42
0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I can see that happening, but do you also get stressed out by a long list of things to do? This maybe leads to avoiding the todos and then you are worse off for making a list in the first place?

Genuinely curious: how do you manage commitments etc. without a todo list?

Easy, I just make a list of things to do. I also use a calendar.

Seriously though, I'm just annoyed by some aspects of them:

1. I feel spread too thin: item 1 doesn't get the attention it deserves because I was thinking of doing item 2. The GTD book itself seems to say, "I'm a victim of this problem."

2. The longer an item stays on a list the less likely I am to do it.

3. I'm annoyed by having a long list of things to do.

4. I was optimistic when I made the list, but later when I'm doing things I become more pessimistic.

5. I like the days when I lose track of time and suddenly it's 17:00 when I thought it was 11:00. I don't usually have that kind of day when I operate from a list.

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#63

Post by Jemmeh »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #30
marpstar wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it's peace-of-mind. If I write it down, I don't have to keep it in memory.

Yes I can see that happening, but do you also get stressed out by a long list of things to do? This maybe leads to avoiding the todos and then you are worse off for making a list in the first place?

No. Even without a list I'd still have all these things to do. Having a list doesn't change anything except I don't have to stress about remembering and forgetting.

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#64

Post by tonyarkles »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #36
craftyguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps some folks stay organized and manage their time effectively.

True. But it's also easy of falling into the trap of getting things done, but failing to be productive. Doing things and doing the right things are two different things.

I've got a pretty massive list of stuff in org-mode. Some of it makes sense to do now to achieve goals right now, and some of it is interesting stuff that I want to think about later (or maybe never).

Dumping it all into org-mode GTD style helped made me feel noticeably lighter. All of this stuff that's been bouncing around in my brain is now stored in a place that I trust to keep it. It's all organized in a relatively hierarchical fashion (projects & sub-projects), with next actions identified for most projects.

Every week (usually Sunday morning), I spent a 0.5-1 hr looking at the week that has passed and looking at the week ahead. Specifically looking at "doing the right things" is the point of this. I look at my overall goals and try to figure out whether or not the tasks (and the containing projects) are what I should actually be working on. If there's tasks that I think should be done in the following week, I schedule those tasks for a particular day so that each morning when I wake up I've got a manageable list of things to accomplish that I've already decided help move the needle in some way.

During that review I also give a look through the list of projects that don't currently have scheduled tasks and figure out if there's one there that should get included in the following week's schedule.

I keep everything driven in there. Some of them are recurring tasks/chores (walk the dogs, clean furnace filter, call Grandma), while some are more tactical (get feature X specced out, touch base with old client X), and some are more strategic (review financial plan).

The beauty of all of this is that the "doing the right things" evaluation and the "what should I be doing today" evaluations are separated but still pretty close in time. This, for me, helps me from getting too caught up in the moment and spending a lot of time doing the wrong things.

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#65

Post by jecxjo »

jacobevelyn wrote: post #56
jecxjo wrote: post #29

I use to use Taskwarrior, using all its features until one day my work life lost all complexity. At that point I felt like all the key features of Taskwarrior were lost because I just didn't have enough complication to track. Now I just use todo.txt and that seems to cover everything I need.

Do you mean the "todo.txt" CLI ( https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli ), or just a file you edit manually? I've used the todo.txt CLI on and off, sometimes in collaboration with my (shameless plug) "friends" CLI ( https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends ) for "tasks" that are social in nature. But I always seem to come back to paper todo lists.

I actually wrote my own in Haskell, but really I just mean the structure. I no longer need huge ordered lists of blocking dependencies. I loved that taskwarrior did that, but once your life becomes less complicated, all the cool features seemed to get in my way. I wanted burndown charts. I wanted an app to figure out what tasks were highest priority based on how much time they could take and deadlines. But once you no longer have any of that...it is basically todo.txt

Edit:

I should also add that with my daily life (outside of work) I'm strictly a pencil and paper kinda guy. I hate when my phone dies and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do today.

Might as well return the shameless plug with my own (https://github.com/jecxjo/todo.hs)

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#67

Post by cowpewter »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #36
craftyguy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps some folks stay organized and manage their time effectively.

True. But it's also easy of falling into the trap of getting things done, but failing to be productive. Doing things and doing the right things are two different things.

That's why traditional GTD has the daily/weekly review steps. You look over your tasks, and make sure they align with your longer term goals, and decide if the things on your list really help you achieve them.

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#68

Post by jecxjo »

tonyarkles wrote: post #38
jecxjo wrote: post #29

I use to use Taskwarrior, using all its features until one day my work life lost all complexity. At that point I felt like all the key features of Taskwarrior were lost because I just didn't have enough complication to track. Now I just use todo.txt and that seems to cover everything I need.

How did your work life lose all of its complexity? I long for a single todo.txt, but have settled on a directory of org-mode files :)

At one point I was the sole engineer on two very large hardware/software projects. Projects that often didn't have dedicated marketing, sales, tech support, internal/external training. So I was wearing a LOT of hats, and I needed a way of figuring out how to be one of the most productive people in the company (for my own reasons) while also only doing the bare minimum of work.

Then one day the company decided they would completely change direction, dropped all future development on current products and moved everyone to their next gen product line. Turns out my two major projects wouldn't have next gen work for 3 to 5 years so I was "demoted" to a "gun for hire". I went from doing way too much work, to filling in the gaps when a team needed to complete a sprint on time. None of my work more than a few days, had no blocking dependencies and had no correlation to what I was going to do next week.

No more burn down, no more charting, no more task management. That is when I decided to change jobs. Now I' have some complexity, but its all easily managed in todo.txt.

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#69

Post by yodon »

grincho wrote: post #35
reacharavindh wrote: post #8

I tried this as well. I'm yearning for a tool that lets me drag & drop an email, and it automatically creates a task based on the content. I can obviously go and edit it after setting deadline or assign to project etc. I was hoping to create this workflow with MS Outlook(on Mac) and its inbuilt Tasks, but apparently they don't support it :-( I would pay for such a feature.

Things ( https://culturedcode.com/things/ ) does pretty much that. It has a little Quick Entry daemon which lets you press control-option-space in Mail.app to make a new task linked to the selected mail. By default, the subject ends up as the task's title, though you can change it before hitting Return. In general, I highlight recommend Things. It does all the typical GTD stuff, in a mostly Maclike way, and has a gre…

Can you click on a created task in Things and get back to the mail message in the iOS Mail app (as opposed to just seeing a copy of the message as text in the todo app the way most todo apps handle email->task connections)?

Re: Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?

#70

Post by bitexploder »

hartator wrote: post #47
rayiner wrote: post #45

Why doesn’t this site do inertial scrolling properly on my iPhone?

Author has too much time in his hand now, and decided to reimplement scrolling.

I actually become intrigued why anyone would do this on a simple personal site that seemed to at least prioritize minimalism. The amount of junk Disqus loaded is nuts. 109 requests. And, as far as my quick skimming can tell, the only JS on the site is Disqus. So it must be some CSS thing or Disqus that causes this behavior.
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