Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chris2048 | Hacker News Reader

Chris2048

I haven't found a decent ToDo list with this killer feature: dependencies.

I want to mark a task as dependant on another being done.

I want to add time estimates to those tasks, and see a gantt chart. I want tasks to show the sum of their dependencies estimates next to their own estimates.

I want priorities to also flow through dependency chains in this manner - if a high priority task is dependant on a low priority task, the low priority task inherits the high priority while that relationship exists. If a deadline of 7pm exists on one task, and it has a dependant task with an estimate of 1hr, that dependency will inherit a deadline of 6pm.

View on HN

This is key for any ADDers - chains of dependencies to ensure that not only raisins are picked off your ToDo List and you get to only see next steps and not all steps. For the past three years I have been working on this in an app sideproject and planned to launch the beta this winter, but I keep getting distracted :) Android alpha testers can get in touch with me.

Yeah, with some TODO managers I've used, the routine was to label things by how frequently I should check them. I ended up re-visiting a lot of things unnecessarily. I was always afraid of a task slipping through the net.

Good search functionality helps, but so does useful metadata attached to tasks to search on i.e. which tasks haven't I looked at in 3 months.

taskwarrior also does this. In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I can't see the chain of dependencies; it only shows the next item and prioritizes accordingly.

I'd love to alpha test this, my email is listed in my HN profile if you'd like to get in contact.

I'd be interested in trying this out. My email is my HN username on google's email service.

Send me an email. This sounds awesome :)

me too :-)

Precisely this.

Beyond that, we need opportunity tracking. Often, there is a very small window in progress can be made on a task. It could be an unique event, a recurring event, a time of day, access to a resource, etc.

- Buy milk when you're near milk - Talk to John when you're near John - Tan when they sun is bright - Catch the train in the next 5 minutes otherwise you'll wait an hour for the next

You can't make a cake if you never have all the ingredients together at once. Synchronization is extremely important. Your basic to-do list lacks the awareness of the world to make you and others more productive.

This is a general problem that deserves a general solution.

It's be interesting for a company like google to tackle this, e.g.

"Your Todo item suggests you are wanting to bake a cake soon? You hovered over a cake recipe using vanilla pods. The store nearby stocks Foo brand vanilla pods for $12..."

Maybe a little too complex though ;-D

Most likely, you just want a cake and don't care to bake it.

A big obstacle to collaboration and global productivity is the assumption that it is cheaper/better to make something yourself rather than purchase it. It couldn't be further from the truth. An expert baker will bake cheaper and better cakes than I ever could.

> Maybe a little too complex though ;-D

It is more important than it is complex. Humanity has waited long enough, it's time we take that step.

A lot of us enjoy the process: it's fun baking the cake, making the robot, playing with the laser cutter. That's what hacking encompasses -- the play, not just the end product.

And most expert bakers around here don't make the kinds of cakes I like. Way cheaper/better to whip one up in 20 minutes than spend hours trying to find a catering service that will use the right recipe (or an improvement) and then someone who will deliver it. The recipe: http://www.thevintagemixer.com/2013/03/tarta-de-santiago-rec...

> An expert baker will bake cheaper and better cakes than I ever could.

An expert baker can bake better and (possibly) cheaper cakes, but it is not necessarily in his or her interest to do so. It may be more practical to make the worst cakes that will sell, and then sell them for as much as the market can bear. (For example, McDonald's employs expert chefs.)

I'm working on a todo app that will address this via automatically-activated contexts. For example, you could have a task which has "@work & @near:Bob" in its Contexts field, and it will appear in your list when the both conditions are met.

(The app currently has all the infrastructure for such contexts, however I'm not yet sure about how to implement person proximity triggers in particular).

Is this public yet?

Once I made a todo list web app with tons of excel like features and unlimited hierarchy and could do any kind of automation with it with built in python script subset. Could be even used as database for other apps. Ultimately features pile on. It gets Harder to maintain, nobody really bought the concept. ( imagine seeing excel for the first time. ) had to give up ultimately. Guess I should clean up and open source it for the interested.

> Guess I should clean up and open source it for the interested.

I'd definitely be interested, at least in some screenshots to see what you mean by having both excel-like features and hierarchy. It sounds somewhat similar to Smartsheet[1], are you familiar?

[1] https://www.smartsheet.com/

Have not heard about smart sheet, but this was something like hierarchical comment thread, with parents have all knowledge about only immediate children. Change propagates along with calculations only higher in hierarchy. I am not at my desk right now but will send screenshots as well as videos once I do.

> but will send screenshots as well as videos once I do.

Sweet! Thanks for following up, I'll keep an eye on this thread.

You are going beyond To Do Lists and stepping into full project management systems. I suppose there would be nothing stopping you from using PM software as a to do list... you would just need to focus your searches on "Project Management", because that is the feature set you are describing.

But I find all tasks to be done, face these constraints, and need to be managed in this way.

PM software tends to include other stuff - like team management, SLA considerations etc. dependencies should be part of any task management system IMHO.

I think you might be blurring the lines between task management and to do lists.

To do lists are what the name implies, a list of things to do.

Once you start adding things like dependencies, etc. to a to do list, it's not really a to do list any more.

If you are going to be that detailed about how you do your tasks, then a traditional Project Management tool (like Microsoft Project) is probably what you need.

Sure it's going to have some extra features you don't want, but nothing is forcing you to use those features, especially if the task management part satisfies your primary needs for dependency tracking, estimate/deadline rollups, etc.

Lots of applications are really full featured databases with a simplifying user interface to suit a particular use case. I think a good Todo list could and should be the same - with both a simple Todo use case supported while also able to become more full featured (I would like something able to handle "getting things done" style planning. But why not be able to scale to full-on project management? It could be made pluggable.)

There's something in that space, though!

Before I can have friends to dinner, I need to buy the ingredients, but before I buy the ingredients it would be good to print the recipes so I don't need to go back to the store. Also, I need to clean the dining room a bit which involves moving the elephant out of the room and into the garage.

Two little streams with deadlines: move elephant, print recipes today.

I worked on an app like this for a while as well, just arranging everything graphically, but abandoned it as too idiosyncratic....

For this problem, Getting Things Done says you should only record the next task. The second doesn't interest you as you only need to think about it once you're done with the first.

Work projects have multiple dependencies because they involve often many people, but Agile has been also pushing backward the desire to plan too much in advance.

The problem (crap, way late to post, sorry) is that you may record the task "Have friends for dinner". THEN you start working backwards on the dependency chain. It's a natural way to break down problems (why am I shopping for food if I don't know what I'm shopping for?). Shopping for my weeknight dinners is different than shopping for my Saturday night party (literally different tasks if they're time separated).

So the desire is to be able to record a target task, and obscure it (so to speak) behind the preparatory tasks. This is where projects and other things come into play. Project: Make a journal for my sister's wedding anniversary. Tasks: Purchase materials, assemble, hire artist friend to produce neat drawing on cover, distribute for signing by family (both sides). Those end up becoming ordered in some fashion (purchase materials, then the rest), or running in parallel (hire the artist friend and paste it into the produced journal, send out a single sewn signature to family and sew it into the final product, assemble the rest and wait). If you've only recorded the task "purchase materials" you don't have a concept of what follows it (and it remains in your head). This doesn't mean you need to see the following tasks, yet (software can hand them behind the tasks they depend on or by date or similar). But recording them is not a problem.

I realized I was heading down that path, and just went full into. I use https://kanboard.net/ to manage a couple todo lists (projects) like upcoming purchases, bills, chores. It's worked out amazing so far.

Omnifocus does this with sequential projects if you're willing to buy into their ecosystem and learning curve.

Actually, Just found a thoughtstream item I dumped a bunch of Todo list manager features I'd like to see, obviously I've thought too much about this o_o;

https://thoughtstreams.io/Chris2048/design-ideas/5907/

Sounds like you're looking for many of the same things as I am. I tried all the usual suspects (including Trello, per the article), and none did what I wanted. I have actually been using Jira for personal task management for the past 6 months or so. It's pretty good, but it's Jira: slow, too many features, etc. It's still better than anything else I've tried.

> time decriptions; 'in an hour', 'every tuesday', 'third day of each week every third month of a leap year', 'within a day of easter, midnight' - some of these might be impossible/impractical - but make it easy to specify a date concept.

Fantastical does this.

Another feature I've found lacking is that most todo / project management systems are all based around "work hours", and the assumption that you can count on every resource reliably putting in 40 hours per week.

Personal projects look nothing like that. This week I might have 2 hours for it, next week maybe zero hours.

I think taskwarrior does this. No gantt chart, though there seem to be third-party front-ends.

Org-mode has the Gant export with estimates and dependencies: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-taskjuggler.html

Not sure about the priority thing though.

Hmm not sure if it tallies all the dependencie times, but taskwarrior has dependency management

I was actually just looking at a listing for a gig yesterday where the client is looking for someone to build this MVP:

> It's a new take on a to-do list focused around dependencies and a hierarchy.

These features would make Trello nearly perfect.

ON IT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com