
GTD Tickler file – a proposal for text file format - vivekv
https://medium.com/@criticalmind/gtd-todo-tickler-proposal-fe18ab324bca
======
westurner
Taskwarrior is also built upon the todo.txt format. [1]

Taskw supports various task dates – { due: scheduled: wait: until: recur: }
[2]

Taskw supports various named dates like soq/eocq, som/eom (start/end of
[current] quarter, start/end of month), tomorrow, later [3]

Taskw recurring tasks (recur:) use the duration syntax: weekly/wk/w,
monthly/mo, quarterly/qtr, yearly/yr, … [4]

Pandas has a "date offset" "frequency string" microsyntax that supports
business days, quarters, and years; e.g. BQuarterEnd, BQuarterBegin [5]

IDK how usable by other tools these date string parsers are.

W/ just a text editor, having `todo.txt`, `daily.todo.txt`, and
`weekly.todo.txt` (and `cleanhome.todo.txt` and `hygiene.todo.txt` with "##
heading" tasks that get lost @where +sorting) works okay.

I have physical 43 folders, too: A 12 month and a 31 day expanding file. [6]

[1] [http://todotxt.org/](http://todotxt.org/)

[2]
[https://taskwarrior.org/docs/using_dates.html](https://taskwarrior.org/docs/using_dates.html)

[3]
[https://taskwarrior.org/docs/named_dates.html](https://taskwarrior.org/docs/named_dates.html)

[4]
[https://taskwarrior.org/docs/durations.html](https://taskwarrior.org/docs/durations.html)

[5] [https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-
docs/stable/user_guide/time...](https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-
docs/stable/user_guide/timeseries.html#dateoffset-objects)

[6] [http://www.43folders.com/](http://www.43folders.com/)

~~~
vivekv
Thanks for a detailed reply. Taskwarrior looks interesting will explore more.
From what I see it seems to be pushing the limit of todo.txt file format by
having all the different types of date formats. Does that mean that typical
clients such as simpletask (Android) won't work with these todo.txt files? I
have made sure I never touch the todo.txt file so all existing tools work fine
while I track everything in tickler.txt

~~~
westurner
IDK how well simpletask handles the date formats that TaskWarrior supports. I
just found simpletask-taskwarrior [1] which appears to use
nl.mpcjanssen.simpletask.sort.DateComparator [2] (which calls
hirondelle.date4j.DateTime.compareTo [3] ) for the date fields of TaskWarrior
tasks.

Obviously, neither ISO8601 sort nor ASCII sort can correctly sort "tomorrow"
or "weekly" with "2101-10-31". TaskWarrior recurring tasks have a parent
template that presumably zero todo.txt tools can at all handle. Not even
Markor.

[1] [https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-
taskwarrior/blob/ma...](https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-
taskwarrior/blob/master/app/src/main/java/nl/mpcjanssen/simpletask/remote/TaskWarrior.kt)

[2] [https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-
taskwarrior/blob/ma...](https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-
taskwarrior/blob/master/app/src/main/java/nl/mpcjanssen/simpletask/sort/DateComparator.kt)

[3]
[https://github.com/IanDarwin/date4j/blob/master/src/main/jav...](https://github.com/IanDarwin/date4j/blob/master/src/main/java/hirondelle/date4j/DateTime.java#L1241)

Ctrl-F only finds one mention of "todo.txt" in
[https://taskwarrior.org/tools/](https://taskwarrior.org/tools/)

------
vivekv
Been a long term practitioner of GTD, I adopted todo.txt about 7-8 years ago
and never looked for tools after that! I created something similar for the
tickler file as well. Would love to get some feedback.

