Todo Lists

Basic Info

In my longstanding quest to cleanse my technical life of Big Tech, I have knocked another item off my todo list: ironically, todo list management itself. I had used Things 3 on iOS for several years, and while it is aesthetically pleasing, what with it's cute little animations and such, it is proprietary and Apple-only. So, naturally, it had to go. My new system? Taskwarrior.

Taskwarrior

I've been intrigued by this system since I first found out about it a year or more ago, but never got around to migrating. As I had every intention of migrating every piece of metadata (dates for: creation, completion, cancelation, deletion; old completed tasks and projects, etc.), I figured I would either have to do this by hand or write a script to do so. Neither task seemed appealing, so I continually put it off. Eventually, I decided that it wasn't worth the effort there and simple moved my uncompleted tasks and projects into it, manually. Once I got started, it really didn't take me that long.

If you aren't familiar with Taskwarrior, it is an application centered on a command line interface (CLI) for managing todo lists. Adding a basic task is as simple as:

My Use Case

I read through most of the documentation before starting this migration in earnest, and was actually a bit overwhelmed. This tool is *huge*. You can configure (per command or with a configuration file) *everything* and add metadata for anything: foreground and background colors for different task states; coefficients for anything you can think of that affects how the tool calculates a task's urgency. A few times I have been tempted to change the defaults of some of these coefficents, but then I realized there was another piece of metadata I could add that would put the task at just the right order in my list. A (likely non-exhaustive) list of modifiable metadata is:

Start date

Due date

Wait until date

Priority (high/medium/low)

Blocks other task(s)

Blocked by other task(s)

Several of these can either be set at the individual task level or at the project level. For project level data, I am not yet sure if this affects *future* tasks for them? I would assume so though. The more of this data you give it, the better it can sort your list. You can even get nice little graphical burndown charts for estimated completion dates of all tasks or even a specific project.

For project-level organization, I did like Things' hierarchical project buckets, which I have not found in Taskwarrior, at least not directly. At first I thought this was going to be a showstopper for me, but then I decided just to do subprojects via My:Own:Mechanism, like so. Good enough for me. If anyone knows of a better way to do this with Taskwarrior, please let me know.

One thing I do not use this for is backlog planning for various software projects. Currently, I use either GitLab for my older projects (like the MUD), or basic markdown files (like for smolver, the software running this server). In the past, I've found that externalizing came with some advantages, namely GitLab's comprehensive feature set, but now I'm leaning more towards keeping them all in one place. I've considered keeping a directory in the software repositories just for Taskwarrior's data files for that project. I'm still thinking on that, though. Migrating all of the MUD's backlog off GitLab would take a bit of time -- and that is one for which I'd absolutely would need the historical data, as the issues sometimes contain a lot of my reasoning for certain decisions. The main reason for considering this move is, in a word, portability. GitLab is an awesome product, but unless you are self-hosting it, it is still just someone else's computer. I am not self hosting it and so am at the whims of GitLab here.

Another reason has a lot to do with running less powerful computers almost (still have a few uses for the old hardware -- one thing at a time!) exclusively recently: PinePhone and Librem 5 USA, now mostly just the Librem 5. While the Librem can handle GitLab pretty well, the PinePhone barely tolerates it. That is tangential, nevertheless befitting Gemini's smol nature.

Productivity

I am not exactly sure if it's the colored output of the task list, the calculated numerical value of a task's urgency, finally seeing a total task count and estimated completion date (depending on how often I work on things -- sometimes it is unable to figure that out due to me not completing things quickly enough to appease it), the nerd factor of another CLI app to use, or some combination of all of that, but so far I find myself more consistently motivated to knock items off the list. Tasks are more satisfying here.

What do you think, dear reader? Do you use Taskwarrior or something like it? Paper? Are your life and hobbies simple enough to keep your todo list in your brain's RAM? Or perhaps your life and hobbies are so simple that the concept of even keeping a todo list is foreign to you? If that last one is you, know that you simultaneously evoke bafflement, envy and intrigue.