
Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life? - daveyarwood
https://blog.djy.io/taskwarrior-where-have-you-been-all-my-life/
======
city41
Google essentially implemented FollowUpThen and Taskwarrior in Inbox via
snoozing and reminders. I can honestly say Inbox has significantly changed my
life. I have to use email every day already, so overlaying task management has
been a huge boon. I have a recurring reminder every Sunday night to take out
the trash. I set up reminders to go off in 1 year (like when I sign up for
something and don't want it to auto renew). I basically setup a reminder for
everything I have to do. And since I have Inbox open all day long anyway, I
never forget anything anymore.

Hey Google, thanks for making Inbox!

~~~
sammorrowdrums
I was searching the comments for someone saying this. Snooze / archive to
achieve inbox zero is life changing. I have one simple rule. If I can't do
something right now, I snooze it until I think I will be able to deal with it.

The knowledge that it will not be forgotten is very cathartic and my inbox
doesn't fill with emails I intend to deal with but haven't yet.

I think what people forget is that time is often a better folder system than
folders, as it doesn't place the responsibility to check again on the user.

I've tried to evangelize and I can't understand why it hasn't resonated as
much with others.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> I've tried to evangelize and I can't understand why it hasn't resonated as
> much with others.

Perhaps it's a trust thing? It only works if you're 100% sure that a snoozed
email _will_ come back every time and no later than you told it to. Is it
reasonable to trust Inbox to do that? Probably, but people have to be
convinced of that. And note that for some of us, trusting the magical AI-
enhanced black box that Google tends to build is a little on the hard side.

~~~
eitally
I don't think it's that at all. Truly. I think it's a trust thing of the
opposite sort: people don't trust themselves to comfortably (and actively)
forget non-critical tasks, which is what the OP does with this method. I think
lots of folks keep things in their inbox because of two reasons: 1) removing
them feels like loss, and increases risk of ultimate forget, and 2) you can't
effectively set a reminder for something you haven't actually read and
understood, and most people don't even read the majority of the mail they
receive.

~~~
sammorrowdrums
On number 2, that's not entirely true, you can be like "I'm not reading this
now, I'll snooze it until x when I'll go through some emails"

For me it's all about reducing noise level and cognitive load. It's made me a
lot more organised, although occasionally I keep pushing things back and won't
admit that I'm not going to do them because I feel like I should do it today
but I probably ultimately won't. Curse my fallible humanity!

~~~
kchr
The "snooze hell" is extremily unproductive if you ask me. Quite often I end
up creating an avalanche of reminders just by snoozing/deferring individual
tasks until "later" instead of deciding when/where to actually perform the
task, so I can continue focus with whatever feels more inportant at the
moment...

Oh, brain :-(

~~~
kingbirdy
I've found "If you can do it in less than 30 minutes, just do it now" to be
very helpful in avoiding that

------
lawn
While technically awesome I've tried using it several times but always end up
dropping it. I find it difficult to maintain and over time it's left to rot
until I finally give up on it.

For me I don't actually need the complexity. A simple text based todo list
would basically do the same job. The main issue is actually maintaining it.

This is why I like habitica more:
[https://habitica.com/](https://habitica.com/)

It's basically a gamified todo list which is perfect for me.

It's also awesome with helping establish new habits. The incentive of not
wanting to break a streak is surprisingly strong. Nothing else has been
remotely as successful.

~~~
tjr225
I find a physical notepad and a pen to be perfect for prioritizing and
recording to-dos. Not sure why it needs to be "optimized" any further.

~~~
JohnKacz
Agreed. I thought it would not be the case but I’ve been bullet journaling for
about 6 months and it’s been revolutionary.

~~~
geoelectric
On Mac, NotePlan does a decent job of distilling out the most important bits
of bullet journaling--searchable markdown-style tasks and notes arranged on a
calendar, with a bit of sugar to allow moving tasks from one day to another.
It's very lightweight but has replaced my homegrown rapid-logging.

------
ISL
I use taskwarrior, and it makes my life better.

Two things I wish I could configure it to do (stating here in case someone
already knows how):

1) A view that surfaces only the next task for each project, with a little
annotation like:

    
    
      Write chapter 1 (First Novel)
      Make grocery list (Juliet's Party)
      Collate transactions (Month-end reconciliation)
    

Without that culled list, a comprehensive task-list is overwhelming.

2) Integration with a calendar (Google Calendar, etc.), where adding events to
the calendar automatically adds them to Taskwarrior.

Thank you, Taskwarrior team! ( I was about to ask for a donate link, but I
finally found one. Thanks :)! )

~~~
daveyarwood
Re #1, my strategy is to make `task ready` my "home base" of sorts. `task
ready` shows you only tasks that aren't blocked or scheduled for the future.
In other words, tasks that are ready to be done ASAP.

My daily flow is to try and clear my plate, i.e. reach "Inbox Zero" with my
`task ready` view. Every task in that view needs to either be completed or
rescheduled for a time that I think I have a chance at completing it.

As for projects with tasks that block other tasks (e.g. write chapter 1 is
"next," and it is the blocker for anything else, like writing chapter 2), you
can tell Taskwarrior to hide them from your `task ready` view by using the
`depends` property. For example, if "write chapter 1" is task 42, then I might
add a task like `task add 'write chapter 2' depends:42`. Until I mark task 42
(writing chapter 1) as done, "write chapter 2" won't show up in my `task
ready` view and I'm free not to think about it.

------
Izkata
I use taskwarrior daily at work primarily for its dependencies and recurring
tasks.

For example, when I pick up a case to work on, I'll immediately add it:

    
    
        task add project:team.kanban case-1234 Add the frob
    

Then as I inspect and think about the parts that need to be done, I'll add a
bunch more pieces as sub-projects:

    
    
        task add project:team.kanban.case-1234 Query backend for the data
        task add project:team.kanban.case-1234 Send ajax call/store in redux
        task add project:team.kanban.case-1234 Add to UI
        task add project:team.kanban.case-1234 Use the new widget for filters
        task add project:team.kanban.case-1234 Make filters work
    

Then I go back and decide which pieces here I want to do before the others.
If, in order, the above tasks were IDs 1-6, then:

    
    
        task 3 modify depends:2
        task 4 modify depends:3
        task 6 modify depends:5
        task 1 modify depends:2,3,4,5,6
    

So at this point, only tasks 2 and 5 are unblocked and can be started on. It
externalizes the state of the case, so I don't really even have to think about
what to do next (hence the name of the default report, "next") or how far done
I am. A good way of thinking about how I choose this breakout is, what could I
commit without breaking the build?

If you also use vimwiki, there's another plugin that works on top of it called
taskwiki [0] that lets you use use a taskwarrior filter to show a set of tasks
in the wiki, that auto-update. It even shows dependencies as indented todolist
items (though the above example wouldn't work because tasks 2, 3, and 5 each
have two tasks that depend on it; this and a few other things has me writing
my own vim plugin for vimwiki that'll handle handle the above, plus a few
other differences).

[0] [https://github.com/tbabej/taskwiki](https://github.com/tbabej/taskwiki)

~~~
amerine
Awesome write-up of your flow. Thank you.

------
zwischenzug
I wrote a post on this some time back:

[https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/12/03/how-i-manage-my-
time/](https://zwischenzugs.com/2017/12/03/how-i-manage-my-time/)

if there's one takeaway, it's that you have to find your own way of getting
what's in your head into a place you can trust, and there's no objectively
right place for that. Just keep looking until you're comfortable with one and
stick to it.

~~~
tra3
> you have to find your own way of getting what's in your head into a place
> you can trust

That's definitely #1. I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to find it. :)

For a long time I was looking for a system that would auto-prioritize tasks
for me. I'd dump things in, and it would tell me what I had to do today, this
week and this month. Long story short, it turned out to be a silly
expectation.

So #2 rule should be, review your tasks periodically.

Basically, an 80/20 productivity system should be:

#1 write everything down #2 review and cull your list every day #3 do things
off your list

~~~
zwischenzug
> #1 write everything down #2 review and cull your list every day #3 do things
> off your list

That's pretty much the 'Getting Things Done' book in a sentence! Though the
advice is every week, not day in the book, and latterly changed to 'whenever
works' with the advent of web systems to track tasks.

------
fsiefken
Taskwarrior is very nice, but I found org-mode combined with the mobile client
orgzly even nicer. Export to ical, sync to server and you have it in your
watch or mobile calendar as well.

~~~
codemac
Do you struggle with orgzly's sync management though? Things seem to get out
of sync a lot with syncthing, so I've stopped editing lists on my phone
(which... is starting to defeat the current iteration of the setup). Or do you
use dropbox?

With WebDAV on MobileOrg, I never really had these problems.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I use Dropbox, and it generally works a-ok with Orgzly. That said, I rarely
find myself using Orgzly - but it's invaluable when I'm on the go and need to
check some info stored in my org files.

It used to have issues, but after couple iterations it seems to be working
quite well now. Some time ago scheduled tasks even started to generate
notifications on the phone, so now I find myself syncing more often just so
that I can get those reminders when I expect to spend a lot of time away from
my computer.

The only thing problem I had with it is that if I delete a file locally, and
then sync Orgzly, it'll restore the file on Dropbox instead of picking up the
delete. After having to re-delete some files couple of times I now remember to
watch out for it, so it's not really a problem anymore.

------
konraditurbe
Task warrior is a hell of a tool - it's synced accross my devices and doesn't
need proprietary software. I built a Taskwarrior app for pebble as well, so I
can have the tasks that have a deadline in the timeline.

~~~
kchr
Please share the Pebble stuff!

~~~
konraditurbe
[https://github.com/konradit/pebble-
taskwarrior](https://github.com/konradit/pebble-taskwarrior)

------
brightball
Years ago I used Remember the Milk and then hopped between multiple "other"
solutions over the years. Decided to give RTM another look last month and was
really impressed.

In hindsight I should have never left it.

IMO Dropbox needs to purchase them to integrate with their growing offering.

------
synthmeat
I’ve used taskwarrior for 3-4 years exclusively, and can state that if you
have a complaint about it, it’s highly likely that you haven’t considered the
problem scope as deeply as its devs did.

But then I stopped being a lone wolf dev and it simply doesn’t work for teams.
Yet.

~~~
kchr
Even if you work in a team, surely you take on individual tasks based on what
team has decided?

------
ibnishak
Is there anyone who used org mode and taskwarrior to get a compare and
contrast?

~~~
ealhad
I guess Org mode is better for someone who is already an Emacs user; and does
anyone use Org mode without Emacs?

Taskwarrior is probably a fine piece of software though.

~~~
eadmund
> does anyone use Org mode without Emacs?

Well, I use Orgzly on my phone, but I use emacs on my desktop & laptops.
Orgzly is okay, but not great — and it has some weird bugs. It's definitely
not a complete port of Org mode, or even a port of _most_ of Org mode. For
what it is, though, it's better than nothing — and better than the current
alternatives.

I really wish that there were a good touch-aware port of emacs on Android.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
It isn't ... really... touch-aware, but shout out to termux for running
normal/full emacs on Android if you're into that. (It will input touches, I
think as mouse events, it's just not what you probably meant by touch-aware)

------
whack
I wonder why no one has mentioned using Google-Calendar as a task-management
tool. I too use (starred) emails to remind myself of tasks that I have
pending. But for anything that's time specific, I just put it on my google-
calendar (or any online calendar really).

Eg: Mow my lawn on Sunday? Ok, I'll create an all-day event on Sunday to mow-
my-lawn. And once I'm done, all I have to do is delete it. I can then
periodically check my calendar from my phone/laptop/tablet, and see everything
I have to do that day/week. If I want to get a head-start on anything that's
coming up next week, it's all there on my calendar too. If I need a reminder,
I can just have it send me a push-notification at a specific time. Best of
all, I never have to be at my computer to get all these info/alerts. As long
as I have my phone nearby, I can check my tasks, and get reminders for
anything I've forgotten about.

~~~
veidr
Yeah; basically any calendar app. Every OS/device comes with one built in;
they can sync across all your devices; they expose the database via SDK or API
so you or others can augment them with additional tools (though I don't find
it necessary).

For me, this has been a solved problem for many years.

It's one of those things where everybody's different, I get that.

But using an email system to manage your tasks seems only one step less goofy
than calling yourself and leaving yourself voice mails. You can make that
work, I guess, but that's not what the tool is for.

I think modern calendars are one of the great software success stories,
actually. They are rock solid reliable, based mainly on hackable open
standards, and work everywhere. I don't delete things from my calendar, I just
leave them in there as a fossil record of my life.

(What was I doing ten years ago on this day? I just checked; apparently I
helped my girlfriend sell her car, bought my sister a plane ticket, and worked
on software for most of the day.)

This data has moved with me from platform to platform and will be accessible
my whole life. This is how computers are supposed to work! (But seldom do...)

------
keslert
Shameless plug for [https://heyhabit.com](https://heyhabit.com) (I'm the dev).
It's meant to be used as a chrome extension that takes over the new tab in
Chrome, but you can try it from the website. I've been using it for ~2 years
now and it works really well off and on. I've discovered that it's really
helpful for getting me back on track when I fall off the horse. Because the
calendar maintains what a "successful" week looks like for me, it eliminates
some of the mental energy required to regroup.

------
LeanderK
offtopic, but I really like the fresh minimalism of the website. The colors
and the choice of the monospaced font are quite unique. It captures the feel
of using a terminal without being boring.

~~~
matte_black
Don’t know about you but on iPhone Safari it’s terrible. No momentum scrolling
makes it exhausting to scroll through, and there’s a broken horizontal scroll.

~~~
jasonmp85
Yes. It’s horrible. I opened it for like 2s and gave up. I guess if reader
mode works this could be OK.

Don’t override scroll behavior.

~~~
krrrh
It’s even worse than that. I actually scrolled all the way down on an iPhone
and the last third of the article was cut off and only accessible through
reader mode.

The irony of a paean to command line tools being housed in unnecessarily
compromised UX is a bit much.

------
bshanks
The todo.txt file format supports extensions, and some of the extensions
include start date, due date, recurring tasks. The Simpletask todo.txt Android
client supports these, and can filter by things that are past their start
date, sort by due date, etc. Todo.txt also supports
projects/contexts/lists/tags and Simpletask can filter by them.

i don't know which todo.txt commandline clients, if any, can do this but i bet
some can (topydo maybe?). Simpletask supports Lua scripting, i dunno if this
is sufficent to allow dynamic prioritization of tasks, but it might be. I
don't think Simpletask supports dependencies but topydo does.

todo.txt is a file format. The nice thing about todo.txt-based tools is that
the todo list is stored in a plaintext file in a relatively readable and
editable format, with one line per task. This allows you to edit it using
ordinary text editors, grep it, and sync it using utilities (resolving
conflicts on a line-by-line basis).

~~~
mpcjanssen
One big area where taskwarrior shines compared to solutions like todo.txt or
org mode is synchronizing between devices using taskd. Although it is a bit
involved to set-up, once it works, it works very well.

I am slowly trying to add task identities to Simpletask to get closer to this
ideal (at the cost of 'ugly' meta data in the Todo file)

------
rhcom2
I use Google Keep with pretty good success. Having one list for "To-Do Now"
(daily stuff) and one for "To-Do Later" (longer term goals). The key for me is
syncing across devices. If I can't add the to-do quickly when I think of it
then the system wouldn't work for me.

~~~
ClassyJacket
What makes Google Keep useless to me is that there is no 'sort by most
recently edited' option, same as Google Drive and really everything google
makes. I have to manually bring each note to the top every time I edit it,
which kills the functionality.

~~~
rhcom2
I tag my to-do lists as "TODO" and pin them at the top. On Android I have a
widget setup only to show things with the "TODO" tag.

------
spott
I run into this every once in a while, but the sticking point is always the
mobile picture. If I want to add a todo item using my phone, what are my
options?

Anyone have any experience with this?

~~~
zeroxfe
I use Google Tasks for this and I love it. It's super simple and lightweight
and I really hope they don't kill it.

~~~
brunoqc
I wish they would add more features. I would love a full featured free TODO
app from Google.

~~~
kchr
What features do you need?

~~~
Slackwise
Not the parent commenter, but...

\- Add a time to reminders, as they're currently only due date reminders.
(Nearly useless, really, other than appearing on your calendar.)

\- Merge Tasks remidners with the Google Assistant reminders, and the Google
Keep reminders. Three different places to have Googley reminders, all
separate.

\- Re-arranging the task lists. (You can only re-arrange tasks on a list, but
not the lists themselves. This is a basic feature that is surprisingly
missing.)

\- Add a widget for the Android home screen so you can keep a specific list in
full view all the time. (This is kinda' a personal wishlist item.)

\- Add Google Assistant voice command support to create tasks, review tasks,
etc. (Super useful while driving and remembering something.)

\- Add tagging to list items, and a search function so you can have "meta-
lists" like "All Items Due Today" without having to maintain items across
lists. (This would allow you implement the GTD methodology.)

\- Add minimal per-list collaboration of some sort, similar to Keep. (I guess
it's already available for Keep, so maybe not super relevant.)

------
platz
[http://mgsd.tiddlyspot.com/demo3.html](http://mgsd.tiddlyspot.com/demo3.html)
TiddlyWiki powered GTD system

~~~
knight17
mGSD is based on TiddlyWiki Classic, here is GSD5, a new project, built on the
current version, TiddlyWiki 5:

[http://gsd5.tiddlyspot.com/](http://gsd5.tiddlyspot.com/)

~~~
platz
I find tw5 a step backwards in terms of usability. Not a fan of design
aesthetics which decrease information density.

------
el_cid
Like the author I went through too many solutions to organize myself.
(Evernote, iOS Reminders app, OneNote, emacs/org-mode, Google apps, iOS
Calendar, Omni tools & many more). I've settled down on using Apple Notes &
Things 3. Things 3 is expensive, but it's simple & has a beautiful UI. It
structures tasks in the same way I think about them. I really like the Quick
Entry feature on the Mac, where I can quickly add a to-do from a web page or
an email... The app seems to be well maintained and I am glad they didn't
choose the subscription route. My biggest wish, a web API.

I really like Notion ([https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)), and I
am sure I could do a great GTD system in it! However, I don't feel comfortable
with subscriptions on apps where I keep MY data. Maybe because I grew up
relatively poor, I always have the fear at the back of my mind, that maybe in
the future I won't be able to afford it and what a big hassle that would be.

------
davidcamel
I got really excited about Taskwarrior and set up a server and accounts for
all of my teammates. But we quickly found that we were spending more time
logging our tasks than we were actually consulting TW for what to do next.

Example:

task add project: support_customer_migration priority: H -- support#XYZ -
analyze dependencies for customer X - github.com/repo/issue/number

~~~
kchr
I think a common misconception of planning is that you wish to avoid logging
and the "hassle" it means. For me, logging what I have done is the only way to
keep track of the project status and let my team members know what have been
done.

------
reacharavindh
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.

~~~
grincho
Things ([https://culturedcode.com/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 great iOS client.

[Edit: In fact, you can actually drag a mail right into a Things window as
well, just as you propose. I never knew that!]

~~~
yodon
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)?

~~~
grincho
Absolutely. The links even resolve on different devices, as long as you have
access to the same mail accounts.

~~~
yodon
Looks like I just blew $10 on this.

The iPad version allows you to create tasks truly linked to emails but the
iPhone version doesnt let you create them you can only open them (from what I
can find, hopefully I’m wrong as I’ve been looking for this feature for YEARS
and would love to make this app home)

------
flavor8
Since nobody has mentioned it, ToodleDo is a good tool with a slightly dated
UI and a terrible name. It has mobile apps, 2FA, projects / subtasks /
scheduling / optional alarms, and a variety of other related features. There's
a free restricted version, also a paid version, which is reassuring.

~~~
dwightgunning
I'm a long time user and have paid the ~$20/year, subscription for >5yrs. It's
been rock solid the whole time.

I find it's got the right out of GTD without being too bloated and/or
cumbersome to use.

------
natex
Does anyone use Taskwarrior with more than just a few tasks? I have about 15
projects going at once and flip between them numerous times during the day.
The projects might have several sub-projects and multiple next actions.

Are Projects/Subtasks implemented well?

~~~
jecxjo
I use to break all of my work up into smallest tasks possible. Was doing
pomodoro, with two large projects, hardware and software, development and
management, multiple feature and bug releases. So tons and tons of tasks! At
one point I had it automated so when I was doing a bug fix I'd create a set of
dependency connected tasks (Understand Bug, Create Fix, Create Unit Test, Code
Review, Documentation, Push Update). I could easily have a hundred tasks in
the queue at any given time.

~~~
kchr
Wow, that was a great tip. I'm also finding myself splitting tasks into
recurring steps like you mentioned, so automating this will save me lots of
time.

------
anotherevan
This 30 minute video from the recent Linux.conf.au may also be of interest.

[https://youtu.be/zl68asL9jZA](https://youtu.be/zl68asL9jZA)

Manage all your tasks with TaskWarrior

------
foo42
Wish I'd seen this a few weeks back before building my own command line app,
it seems I've taken an almost identical approach to them in everything I've
implemented, though obviously they're much farther along! Still, part of the
motivation for building my own was to trick myself into getting the habit of
checking the list every day since I'd be keen to dogfood it - that's worked
out pretty well so I can't complain!

~~~
fenwick67
Me too, I just wrote a quick CLI app for logging my work on Monday

------
sp332
If you just want to schedule emails without involving too many third parties,
you can do this in the Outlook mobile app by swiping right on any email. For
the desktop app, right-click an email and use the "Follow Up" menu.

You can also do it in Google's Inbox app, but you have to swipe left instead.
The Inbox website lets you schedule emails by hovering over an email and
clicking the clock icon.

------
dbecks
Not sure if this helps, but I made a little iOS app a while ago to help with
my workflow. Check it out: HiFutureSelf
([http://hifutureself.com](http://hifutureself.com))

HiFutureSelf is a super fast way to send messages to the future as reminders.
You can set a time or location to trigger the message. It's completely free
and maintained for fun :)

~~~
yig
I use calendar events. Then I can also allocate time to do the task.

~~~
dbecks
Totally! I do too!

Maybe it's just me.. but somethings just don't fit into the calendar.

Like when I pull up to the gym I get a message to do my 100 squats for the day
(AND NOT ACCEPT LESS). Or when I arrive to the grocery store to pickup
shampoo. Or when I leave the office today to go by the pharmacy to pick up a
prescription...

------
atrexler
I'm currently using Asana for task management. I guess the only upside is that
I can share tasks with my wife, but its clearly not really meant for just
single person management.

Has anyone tried both taskwarrior and asana? Any obvious pros/cons?

taskwarrior seems much simpler and can live locally if you dont want locked in
asana/whatever?

~~~
comnetxr
I've tried both. I liked Asana a lot in the early days - it was simple and
removed the friction of logging tasks. I especially liked that many tasks
could be entered in the same way as an outline, just using enter to drop to
the next line and tab/shift-tab to nest tasks. All the task properties I
needed were visible at once and I could quickly tab through the task details
and log what I needed. Eventually they added more features for teams and the
features I liked became more complicated to use, so I dropped it.

I tried taskwarrior as well, thinking that being in the command line would
reduce the friction for entering tasks as I spend so much time there already.
However, the friction is higher for viewing and reorganizing tasks so I would
fill up a todo list and then not use it.

------
toastking
This seems really cool but I can't imagine using a task manager that doesn't
also have a mobile app.

~~~
ISL
Taskwarrior has a mobile client:
[https://taskwarrior.org/news/news.20160225.html](https://taskwarrior.org/news/news.20160225.html)

~~~
Grumbledour
The play store link seems dead, though?

~~~
ISL
Hm. The taskwarrior app I use daily is gone from the Play Store.

The author now offers something called TaskwarriorC2 that may have similar
functionality, with a different UI spirit.

 _Edit:_ I just installed TaskwarriorC2 and got it working (by hand-copying my
hard-won profile configuration from original taskwarrior (pem files, taskrc,
etc., the whole profile directory)) from kjv.task/files/ over to the
com.taskwc2/files/ directory on the phone. Editing the taskrc file is
currently broken for me, so if I hadn't already had one, configuration would
have been daunting.

Now that TaskwarriorC2 is working: If you're a taskwarrior poweruser, the
interface is awesome. If you'd never used taskwarrior before, it would seem
inscrutable.

~~~
wingtask
I was never happy with the Taskwarrior client you linked so I'm launching a
mobile client alternative for taskwarrior:
[https://wingtask.com](https://wingtask.com)

~~~
ISL
Awesome. <Picard>Make it so!</Picard>

------
mikedilger
I find invariably that if I write something down anywhere, it falls out of my
head, after which point I stop thinking about it, I lose motivation, and
unless I permanently slave myself to the task manager it does not get done.
There is a lot of value in keeping everything in your head.

------
jecxjo
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.

~~~
jacobevelyn
Do you mean the "todo.txt" CLI ([https://github.com/todotxt/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](https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends))
for "tasks" that are social in nature. But I always seem to come back to paper
todo lists.

~~~
jecxjo
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](https://github.com/jecxjo/todo.hs))

~~~
stewbrew
There are some extensions that bring task dependencies to todo.txt. IMHO
outlines are a quite natural extension of the original format that can be used
for that without making things too complicated.

~~~
jecxjo
I totally agree. I am currently trying to figure out how to best do that with
todo.txt with the minimal amount of dependencies. I liked in taskwarrior how
all the tasks were numbered and could be referenced, but it required a big
infrastructure in taskwarrior, which is more painful in todo.txt.

~~~
stewbrew
There is no use in numbering tasks in todo.txt files. But you (as a developer)
can create an id based on the current time stamp and the tasks content that
can be referenced later on. The VIM ttodo_vim plugin does it this way.

------
rconti
It always blows my mind when people who claim to have issues with focus or
task management then go on to talk about how they've automated tons of trivial
tasks. That sounds like the OPPOSITE of someone who has issues with focus.

~~~
aidenn0
There are people who are so task focused that they waste a lot of energy
worrying that they're not working on the right task! If you're at all like me,
then this is a foreign concept. The introduction to GTD hints that it is
specifically targeted at people like this to reduce their anxieties. It also
caused me to stop reading the book because, as I said, that concept is mostly
foreign to me (I have observed it in others, but my empathy is insufficient to
truly understand it).

~~~
jecxjo
There are also people w/o the anxieties, who live their lives as firefighters.
Every day take on the emergencies!

That was me for a long time. When you have a job that is constantly filled
with fires you can survive for a long time doing this. The problem is that
sometimes a non-fire tasj can start out as low priority but eventually become
the most important thing you have to do today all based on a due date. Unless
you are good at managing your future tasks, you'll often miss them.

I never had anxieties about getting things out the door, mostly because my
bosses were constantly chopping down one or two of the legs of my stool
(money, time, resources). But it was easy for me to keep pushing a low
priority task to the bottom of the list because its not due yet, totally
forgetting about the fact that eventually it will be due.

------
romanr
Hitask ([https://hitask.com](https://hitask.com)) does everything, has Google
Calendar sync and Chrome extension. iOS, Android apps, team sharing and many
more.

------
joe-collins
I know Google's scary, but having task management/scheduling built into and
up-front in their Inbox is wonderful. When I saw that, I ditched the old gmail
interface and haven't looked back.

------
psychedelic
Am I the only one still using a #2 pencil and a piece of paper for my 'to do'
lists???

~~~
daftao
I carry a Mead memo book and a pen in my back pocket at all time, it's great
for taking notes, recording stuff I don't want to forget, doodling, etc..

Added bonus: I can take it out to write a to-do and not accidently spend 20
minutes on Twitter or HN. Beats any other productivity app I ever tried in
that regard.

~~~
aidenn0
After having a mead go through the laundry, I switched to a rite-in-the-rain
with a fisher. The notebook can survive 2-3 trips through the laundry before
it becomes hard to read.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
Why is a todo list a good idea?

~~~
the_af
I understand why the TODO list is a good idea. My memory is terrible, I get
confused if I don't write down everything I was doing and everything I was
planning to do the next day.

What I'm unsure about is whether the actual tech behind the TODO list matters.
It seems we love to discuss this (or reimplement it!) because we're
programmers and/or tech people, and tech naturally appeals to us. But I'm
unsure Taskwarrior or any particular tool actually matters. I think what
matters is that you keep a TODO list in whatever format is useful to you. To
me, the discipline matters; the actual tech/UI behind it is pretty much
irrelevant.

~~~
Shank
> I think what matters is that you keep a TODO list in whatever format is
> useful to you.

It's just that. That's why programmers keep making todo lists. Because some
people want more flexibility, some want less. Some need some specific feature
set, and some think other features are stupid. They're simple enough systems
that people can build whatever flavor they want -- and it'll work for them --
rather than be constrained to whatever is available.

------
gtt
Awesome. Could someone recommend note-taking tool with the same spirit?

~~~
kchr
vim.

------
ademars94
The way this article scrolljacks on mobile makes it unreadable.

------
hartator
I didn’t knew FollowUpThen, it seems very handy.

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

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

~~~
Slackwise
I don't see any actual¹ JavaScript on the page, so how would this have been
accomplished? Some fancy but broken scrolling manipulation CSS...?

1: The only JS on the page is an IE conditional comment adding an HTML5 shim
script, and the Disqus comment embedding script. Then there's the Google
analytics that gets pulled in from font references and I guess Facebook JS via
the Disqus embed.

~~~
svnsets
It's some not-even-fancy CSS. The site has "overflow: auto;" on the body :/
RIP iOS users

[https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/momentum-scrolling-on-io...](https://css-
tricks.com/snippets/css/momentum-scrolling-on-ios-overflow-elements/)

~~~
aidenn0
WTF! I had no clue that overflow: auto messes things up so badly for iOS
users. I'll have to file that for the next time I'm writing CSS. I wonder what
the justification for that is...

------
pmarreck
Was immediately turned off by his devotion to the ridiculously overrated Inbox
Zero.

Inbox Zero is a gross waste of time and essentially OCD masturbation. Using
tools (like filters, or a better email client with smart prioritization such
as [https://sparkmailapp.com/](https://sparkmailapp.com/)) to prioritize
important emails is far superior and has zero ongoing maintenance cost in
time:

[https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/worlds-dumbest-time-
manag...](https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/worlds-dumbest-time-management-
technique-inbox-zero.html)

If you want to _actually_ get productive, get RescueTime:
[https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/)

There is a very good reason why the Spark iOS app doesn't even bother showing
your unread count.

~~~
sametmax
I am more productive with zero inbox than other tools. And since neither of us
can prove we are right, let's accept it's just an opinionated tool, and it's a
matter of taste.

~~~
pmarreck
> And since neither of us can prove we are right

Actually, that's false. Use
[https://www.rescuetime.com/](https://www.rescuetime.com/) and compare with
people who don't use this system, divide by the number of incoming emails per
person, and you'll know in short order.

Empirical data is a wonderful tool to find truth.

