Checklistomania makes it easy to keep track of relative tasks

It isn't clear from the description, but does this allow you to have tasks become 'triggered' for lack of a better term once a task has been completed? eg I want my task list in the morning to say make eggs and bacon, then once I've done that a new task pops up for me to do the dishes.

In case you want to quickly try out your own version. I created a fork that uses Auth0 for authentication so you can use any identity provider plus it has a deploy to heroku button. You can try it out here:

https://github.com/auth0-samples/checklistomania

"When a new hire joins the federal government, existing employees complete over 60 tasks to bring them on board."

"This is particularly useful in government, because we need to complete quite a few training sessions and pieces of paperwork."

I can see the value in building a tool to track all of the moving pieces in what appears to be a bureaucratic, inefficient system ... but I would love to see more work put into resolving those inefficiencies.

Can any of those tasks be automated?

Is there any way to reduce the amount of paperwork required?

Can the training sessions be replaced with online tutorials?

Etc.

This could be applicable for user-side documentation of any form of bureaucracy as either an employee or a customer (most enterprise fiefdoms basically have to consider other employees their customers) because it tends to follow a really long Gantt chart combined with a digraph (potentially cyclical, unfortunately I found). It also happens to address the usual problems I have with most to-do systems where I can have so many unforeseen problems that it is pretty much impossible to set and achieve goals within a certain allotted timeframe (the GTD system, for example, makes zero promises that you'll be able to achieve any of your set goals even if you follow it perfectly and to your best abilities, after all). It reminds me all too much of writing a nasty mess of nested asynchronous calls where the instant anything went wrong you'd probably wind up at square one.

It's unfortunate how this kind of to-do list is something I've almost never seen considered in an enterprise workflow for UX design because it shows a great deal of integration points that are weak and could use improvement, potentially with minimal resourcing. In my limited practice, I've only ever seen the Fortune 500 basically write pie-in-the-sky Visual Studio sticks and boxes or the equivalent of a nasty nested asynchronous call stack.

After running a local version, I thought I would add some notes about my experience:

- This seemed really cool since we have various processes and this would let us both document and operationalize the processes. Things like: add/change user permissions or create a new vm/container, etc. We could make it easy to show where documentation is and what should be updated.

- Installation is simple, but it is hardcoded to authenticate against Github and look and see if you are a member of the 18F group. If not, you are refused access. Changing the group is just a simple edit to the app.js file, but changing authentication from Github to another source would require adding another passport config file into api/ (as far as I can tell), and possibly additional dev.

- The checklists are all json files, there's no UI for creating the checklist. In fact, there's no CRUD for checklists at all, they are flatfile managed with a text editor. This is not ideal, but building an editor might not be too rough. The main thing is that checklist creation is a developer operation.

- There is no UI for associating checklists with role/users or grouping the checklists. Everyone sees all of the checklists and then self-selects which checklist they want to add to their plate. It looks like the tasks are all user-specific, so you couldn't have a checklist that was divided up amongst a team, it is all single-user focused. I suppose you could create a dummy team user that multiple people had access to, but that seems icky. Similarly, while you can see other user's tasks, you can't take one of their tasks and help them out by doing it.

- There's no context for the tasks. If you had two new employees or two VMs to provision, you would have to do them one at a time. Adding a second checklist while you have a first in progress just gives you a pile of duplicated tasks that have no context as to which initial action they are related to. You can add a note to the initial checklist assignment like "SE3: Jane Doe" which will give some context for that assignment, but I don't see where that is related to the tasks. If the tasklist showed "Checklist Name - Checklist Note" in the table, then at least you could keep them separate.

Otherwise, I would love for this to work. I am in academia where we have two problems that this impacts: 1) we have lots of bureaucracy 2) we have lots of turnover in IT staff because we pay poorly. For both of these reasons, having a checklist tool would be fantastic.

Devs: please comment!

My tax dollars paid for 94% test coverage??

FWIW, a related product, more general but less mature (I'm the author): http://onemodel.org/ (AGPL). Highly efficient at managing lists but doesn't yet share data between accounts except by exporting the data as txt or html. I use it heavily, daily, to manage checklists/tasks and notes on many subjects.

I see it as the beginning of a platform to change how individuals (or mankind) manage knowledge overall. Future features involve exploiting the internals for collaboration (linking instances, sharing data, subscribing to each others' data, mobile, etc)

Feedback or participation are appreciated. If one has any interest at all, I suggest signing up for the (~monthly?) announcements list at least.

Is this easy to deploy in your own shared server such as GoDaddy and HostGator?

A few years ago I worked in a research lab for the DoD. They definitely aren't joking about the amount of onboarding tasks, training, verifications, etc. It took most of my time over the first two weeks. Some of the offices are only open for very limited hours and only on certain days and so they're always backed up. This will be very useful. Even just having access to modern web apps is a welcome change.

This is fantastic, thanks for sharing! This gives me so many ideas I'd like to fork and try out. Does this support recurring tasks?

Don't forget about TopChart.io (YC) and Trello, two other very easy ways to make checklists.

How is this different from Asana or Wrike or the glut of tasks-as-a-service products?

I hope something like that can be used in medical applications.

"When a new hire joins the federal government, existing employees complete over 60 tasks to bring them on board"

They sound down right proud of their bureaucracy.

Not far different from the name of our list tracker - http://youresam.team-duck.com/listomania/