
Ask HN: Recommendations for tool to manage optional tasks? - grammernerd
Hi, I&#x27;m starting to think about an approach to minimal documentation&#x2F;tracking of tasks when tackling software work and I&#x27;m curious about any tools that might make this easier.<p>The core concept would be something like a checklist manager where each thing you want to get done (let&#x27;s call that a workItem) gets a consistent checklist of tasks.<p>Each of the tasks must be addressed in some way, either by completing the task OR by stating why you&#x27;re not going to complete the task.<p>The workItem should contain a minimal record of the work done and choices made.<p>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.<p>The point is that no one forgets it, or assumes that it&#x27;s unnecessary. The decision to do or not do something is always taken positively and transparently.<p>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?<p>thx
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katelynsk
I quess a lot of existing tools allow to do the same or something similar. For
example, Riter ([https://riter.co](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).

