Lists, more lists, and the power of checkboxes (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Lists, more lists, and the power of checkboxes (2019)

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82 pointsTomte56 comments

Checklists are one of the most powerful tools at your disposal when coordinating complex work efforts (either with yourself or others).

Even totally solo, I will draw up a checklist in the morning and then execute it in the afternoon. If I just start working my tasks without making a plan, I will forget ~20% of the tasks or detailed feature items I had originally intended to handle. Rinse and repeat this for multiple days and we have a problem.

We have customer implementations that can require months of detailed work. Making sure some critical configuration flag isn't dropped on the floor along the way is the most important thing. I have seen checklists that take years to fully execute.

I am a huge huge fan of nested checklists. The interesting thing is that there aren't many apps that fundamentally work with the notion of nested checklists that are collapsible and can be re-arranged in different views.

I believe there's a unicorn startup waiting that specializes in checklists.

PalmOS had a few apps like this—SplashNotes is the only one I can find—and I’m still surprised that something like that hasn’t been carried forward to newer platforms. The best one can do is use MS Word in “Outline View”, and then you can indent items based on the heading style. That has served me well for a long time.

If you're on linux, Check out Minder, An open source mind mapping tool. It has a task list feature where you can convert sub items to tasks and it's just PERFECT for this style of task tracking.

https://i.imgur.com/7Q6QHgo.png

completed tasks are full circles, unfinished is empty circles, You can also see notes here, and folded items.

also a highly keyboard focused application. F for fold unfold, T for task set and complete.

https://github.com/phase1geo/Minder

(Not the easiest thing to search for - "minder" doesn't bring up an app, "minder app" doesn't bring up a Linux app.)

Good, easy support for nested checklists is probably the main reason that org-mode became so popular IMHO.

How do you make unicorn money off of techniques that are so simple they can be conveyed in a few paragraphs, and used with nothing more than pen and paper?

Is that not a close proximity to how you could describe Twitter?

Templates for recurring projects. Task dependencies. Commenting. Assignments. Intuitive structure and UI.

Checklists end up being a basic component for most project management software.

Clickup is doing this pretty well right now.

Would love to get your feedback on bytebase.io - our checklist features is specifically inspired by this article, with three states: empty, half-filled, filled. You just hit 'X' to iterate through the states. Checklist items can be infinitely nested.

https://intercom.help/bytebase/en/articles/4587112-to-dos-in...

Have you seen Workflowy? https://workflowy.com/hello/

I went to that site, and still haven't seen Workflowy. It says it will help me stay organized and then wants me to sign up, without talking about what it actually does.

Try this link instead:

https://workflowy.com/demo/embed/

It's a live demo with brief instructions that shows you how it works right away. Workflowy lets you zoom in to a sub list to focus on one thing, then zoom back out again.

I highly recommend checking out Workflowy.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@eaj/todo-cli

I built this todo CLI with it in mind. Items/actions are recursive.

Worry not! I'm almost done with Nestful:

https://www.nestful.app

Need to squash some bugs, add labels, add state ("checkboxes"), a sync indicator and then I think it'll be good for early adopters.

The page doesn't load for me, although I have found https://nestful.io quite a pleasing alternative.

Thanks for checking it out. I'm not quite done yet, but I believe that if you come back next week it should be stable enough.

I've been frustrated as well with that; my mind is inherently hierarchical/nested, so when I plan, document or checklist something, I neeed levels and indentations.

I've been using ToDoist for a while now and it's worked well. Some of the recent features/changes have clearly been for people with workflow different than mine, but the overall easy-nasting of tasks/subtasks to multiple levels and easy-drag-drop rearranging works well, and it's available on both web and phones.

todoist.com/app/

Reminders on Mac/iPhone/etc does just this.

make a list and you can easily drag and drop between items to create items sub-items, collapse sublists, move them between different lists, etc.

I'm rather fond of MyLifeOrganized (https://www.mylifeorganized.net/), an outliner available on Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS. It offers the ability to zoom into a branch of a tree, which I find very valuable. The developer offers a subscription sync service, which I use to keep my tree sync'd between desktop and mobile.

Unfortunately it's not available on MacOS: "We're considering developing Mac version"

Whoops, my apologies. I use MLO on Windows and Android; I saw the icon on their site and assumed they had a port. If I were on MacOS, I would probably use Omnifocus ( https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus/ ).

Founder of Taskade here. We've been tackling this exact problem for the past few years, building a tree-structured nested checklists that spans across multiple visualizations and views, from boards, org charts, to mind maps. It is also collaborative and syncs in real-time cross device.

You can give it a try here no signup needed: https://www.taskade.com/new

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Prices?

It seems to be $9/month if you want things like recurring tasks or sorting.

Shows me $5/month: https://www.taskade.com/pricing

Maybe it knows I'm stingy so it shows a low price. The free version is a real free version, in the sense that it provides a lot of value. I like using it as an outliner.

Thanks! We have many outliner feature improvements planned including more keyboard shortcuts and import via markdown.

If you have any particular requests, please do take a minute to add them to https://feedback.taskade.com

Sorting is free for most of the options, only Sort by Due Date is paid behind the paywall. We will update https://taskade.com/pricing to clarify this. You can see a screenshot here of the demo: https://i.imgur.com/FVRHDAV.png

Recurring tasks is paid, but task due dates, reminders, push notifications via email, browser, mobile, are all included free without any limits.

If you have any other questions, do let us know!

Taskade is free for individuals and teams with no limits on total tasks, projects, collaborators and workspace members.

The only limitations are advanced features and larger file uploads at the moment.

Features & Pricing: https://www.taskade.com/pricing

P.S. we do provide discounts for startups and non-profits. Just reach out! :)

I have a full app very close to public launch that makes nested lists and checklists easy and powerful. It's a personal app I've used for years and finally decided over covid to turn into a true product. I'm garbage at fundraising and have 0 wealth in my network so I'm just bootstrapping as best I can... but nested lists are insanely powerful, I'm probably in the 1% of high context switching costs, context switching is absolutely painful for me which is why I built this for myself, easy, fast structure means I can live in the structure of what I'm doing and by always knowing my place it transforms many "context switching" events in my brain to simpler "working the next task node" events which has insanely less cognitive overhead for me. It's the only productivity software that has helped me do more.

Post a link to your project or landing page

Dynalist.io serves this purpose for me.

I won't try to sell you anything, but this is the basis of Emacs org mode.

And then it adds note taking, literate programming, and hyperlinking to, well, anything you or someone else wrote a protocol handler for.

I'm not as smart as I used to be and my short term memory and long term recall are both not what they were in my teens, but using org-mode as a prosthetic brain has kept me as if not more effective.

I just wonder if anyone can identify with me, thinking it's absolutely crazy to invest energy in any feature or app that has a "nested" (hierarchical, tree) data structure as your primitive, when for any project with dependencies, what you need is a graph structure - meaning, items that can be blocked by multiple parents. Basically, if your item can only have one parent, you're already doing it wrong. I know it's a hard problem, but we haven't even scratched the surface of what kind of UI/UX features there are to make it easier to deal with. This is the problem people should be iterating on, but it's like no one wants to deal with graph data structures.

Outside of the apps with way too many features like MS Project and Omniplan (it doesn't need to be as complicated as Gantt charts or even PERT charts), I know of only two pieces of software that try to tackle this in a graphical sense: Flying Logic and Taskheat. Taskwarrior has some support for it but it's clunky. Orgmode barely has support for it via org-brain but still clunky.

FYI, Org-mode supports multiple dependencies via org-depend (blocking entries do not have to be nearby and can even be located in a different file).

Thanks for the recommendation for Taskheat BTW; that looks pretty amazing. I'm curious, have you actually tried using Flying Logic for task planning?

Flying Logic is like my secret weapon, I use it daily for both work and home. There are some features I wish it had which it will never have due to it being Java, but I can pretty much work around all of them. I tend to use a vertical orientation for explanation/justification, and a LR orientation for task planning. It's also better than things like draw.io and figma for quick architectural meetings with team members, since it re-orients as you draw. For home, I also use it for recipes, especially those that require multiple cooks at once.

Thanks -- that's fascinating. I can imagine it works well for planning multi-course meals. You've piqued my interest enough to give it another look one of these days. I had looked into it briefly a few years ago when it was pitched more as a constraint management tool than a general purpose tool.

I've been using SuperProductivity and other than the sometimes junky Flutter UI, I wouldn't replace it with anything else.

Even further: you need draggable nested checklists, where you can select an item, drag it, and all of it's nested children follow. I'm currently using the 2016 / desktop version of OneNote for this and it's incredible. Give it a try. The main downside is it's lack of code formatting support.

People have mentioned Workflowy which is very nice.

Another nice system is Checkvist (the v is formatted like a check mark in their logo).

Go to https://checkvist.com and press Enter to go to the demo/overview page.

You can nest hierarchical lists, and you zoom in on a sublist, and most every feature seems to have a keyboard shortcut.

I just checked out checkvist, it looks great! It has many things that workflowy doesn't have, such as due dates, tags, etc.

What I don't like about workflowy is that nodes can be completed, but they don't have a checkbox.

Org-mode has had nested collapsible chceklists since its inception, and you can do a lot of fancy stuff with it too.

I’m a big believer in checklists, ever since my medical residency when I realized that not having a very clear, organized list of what I had and hadn’t done could lead to someone getting hurt.

My current todo list lives in Obsidian.MD which syncs via GitHub to my phone and computers.

Question: are there any ways in standard markdown to indicate a partially complete checkbox as illustrated in this post? I’ve not found anything. Seems like a “[/]“ would be a good way to indicate partial completion since an “[x]” (or another character) is usually checked box.

I would challenge the need to track partial completion. A well-crafted item in a checklist is either done or it is not.

If your concern is about indicating that you started something and are now waiting on results, then I would argue that there are actually 2 separate items there ("do the thing" and "receive the results").

The problem with a "partial completion" indicator is that it doesn't really tell you anything about how much of the thing is still left to do. You'll have to think about it when you come back to it, which you will do anyway if you simply leave the item unchecked.

Agreed. Partially completed might be nice if you're tracking someone else's work (subordinates) but for my own, I would need at least one more item saying where I left off or why I didn't finish in one sitting.

I'm sure this works for Adam making god knows what at ILM though.. its just not for me in a software dev environment.

Good point! (And this is how I’m currently operating). If your list will be stretched over a team or over multiple days, I think it’s worth it to prioritize the specifics of what has been done and not done.

However, for a single day, personal todo list, I’d prefer to have fewer lines in my list and keep the details of what exactly is still pending in that partially complete item in my head. Seems easier to glance at. It would be nice for markdown interpreters to have an option for this for those who want to use it. I wonder if this could be added as a CSS tweak …

In my Dropbox-synced todo list I use the following notation:

  [ ] Todo. 
  [?] Pending feedback. 
  [>] Currently underway.
  [X] Complete.

Mine:

    o task 1 [not started]

    / task 2 [started]

        x nested task A

        o nested task B

    + task 3 [blocked, e.g. on hearing back from somebody]

    x task 4 [done]

I started using Obsidian recently and have been using it for markdown checklists. I tried to create collapsible sections, but found that as soon as I enclose a section with a <details> tag, Markdown rules are no longer applied, so if I want my items on separate lines I need to at <br> tags. It’s not the end of the world, but I’d love a workaround if you’ve found one.

- "If I want my items on separate lines"

What's wrong with

- [ ] Text

- [ ] Text2

This works in the raw markdown edit mode, but in preview mode, if I write this:

<details> <summary>People</summary> [ ] Bob [ ] Alice [x] Nemosaltat </details>

Preview mode will yield this (all on one-line):

[ ] Bob [ ] Alice [x] Nemosaltat

It’s collapsible, but not visually pleasing for longer lists.

My solution has been to do this:

<details> <summary>People</summary> [ ] Bob <br /> [ ] Alice <br /> [x] Nemosaltat <br /> </details>

But it’s less pleasing to look at in edit mode, and I have to remember to append the break tags.

I don’t have a solution for that, but I did just start looking through the large community plugins list — there are a lot that address these types of specific use-cases, so it might be worth a browse:

https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/blob/master/...

(not able to edit my previous post at this point, but wanted to follow-up for you and anyone else reading this in the furture)

I just watched a video for an Obsidian plugin called "Outliner" and I think it does what you're trying to do with collapsible sections. Here's the video, it's the first plugin that he reviews: https://youtu.be/2234DXKbNgM

To me, it's not a checkbox so much as it is a tri-state progress bar: no progress, some progress, complete; and also the outlining of them sounds much like a compressed gantt chart [0]. As for the idea and power of lists, there's a great talk by Atul Gawande on Youtube[1], which I'd highly recommend.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfl8Xt8W09A

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