Dating Other Task Managers | Hacker News Reader

Dating Other Task Managers

evantravers.com

100 pointsbosky10156 comments

I initially thought the title referenced dating someone with a job title of "task managers".

Same here… was looking forward to a description of how a couple of task masters perfectly distribute chores among themselves and break arguments up into little sub arguments.

That made me laugh out loud. Somebody should write that scenario as a short story for all people who love or hate task management. And for me, please.

I've been passively on the hunt for a task manager for a couple weeks now. It seems everything points to Todoist for me. I love the idea of org mode but it's too much for my use case and I think a mobile app would be pretty helpful for me, given how often I'm away from a computer. I don't use Apple products so Things 3 is out. Obsidian is an interesting knowledge management tool that I'm looking into separately but it would replace a different tool I currently use for a different purpose so it doesn't make sense to mix those right now. Bullet journalling kind of defeats the point because I want repeating tasks to be automated (e.g. remember to do laundry once a week,be ready to go grocery shopping every 2 weeks, etc).

The biggest issue is how I want to organize tasks. The way I see it, there are several categories of tasks that exist in my life sperated by frequency, due dates or lack thereof, and priority. It'd be nice to have them all in one place but still treated as somewhat separate. It's like the difference between "stop at the drug store some time this week", "look into this new web framework at some point when I get some down time", "take out the trash on Sundays", "journal every day", "file this report by the the of the month", "it'd be nice to pick up some new jeans at some point", etc. They should all be treated fundamentally differently but they all take up my time so I want them aggregated. Arguably it's even more important to aggregate the ones without deadlines because they're the most likely to be put off. I've been thinking about making my own solution but I haven't decided on the best way (or even a good way) to model it yet.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for by making this comment. I guess in part I'm curious if others have had similar experiences and what solution works well for them.

You should try "remember the milk".

Cf. https://github.com/abrochard/emacs-todoist

Try Akiflow.com, it's great for merging all tasks in a single palce and then planning and scheduling.

Disclaimer: I work @Akiflow :-)

My issue with Todoist is it doesn’t recognize the concept of start dates and due dates — there are only dates. Many tasks can be open to be started before they’re technically due, but Todoist can’t model this.

I recommend 2Do.

Sure you’ll get tons of recs but I’ve found Sunsama to be a great tool for separating things into categories.

It’s helped me separate family house tasks from work tasks. I can view them, plan them, etc separately or together.

Does taskwarrior meet your needs?

It has a mobile app, cli interface, and web UI.

Tasks are organized by hierarchal "project"(like "home", "home.wardrobe") and have 20 standard attributes that can be given(time estimate, due date, dependencies, priority, urgency). When looking at the list of tasks the default ordering is priority, and you can filter by project or other attributes. It also supports recurring tasks for things you want to track over time(i.e. your daily journaling and monthly report examples).

Amidst Apple's CSAM debacle I switched from iPhone to LineageOS and started learning more and more about how non-existent privacy is these days. I always thought I was protected - I used all Apple products after all. I had been completely hoodwinked by Apple's privacy marketing messaging, somehow deluded into believing the world's largest company and PRISM partner had my back. The pendulum swung the other way, perhaps a little too far, and in the following months I also began to move off of almost all hosted services. It's been quite enjoyable, but I digress.

So I too have tried every Things replacement under the sun, including in the beginning of my metamorphosis into paranoaic, those that host data on their servers like Todoist. Except I haven't tried orgmode, I don't use emacs. Travers arrives here on what is still a hard requirement for me:

> I have always required that my task manager be equally accessible on my phone and computer… I have changed my mind. I don't need the full-featured Brain on my phone

He claims it's a feature, "disconnect to create". I'm not sure I buy it, sounds more to me like a post-hoc justification for giving up on a requirement of the search. If so I find no fault here. There is literally no replacement for Things, it simply doesn't exist. Things is one of the best pieces of software in the history of software. I miss it everyday.

I still use an Apple laptop, so I ended up just using Reminders which is God awful. For quick entry I found an app called "Menu for Reminders" that is good enough. On Android I use Tasks.org, and I sync everything with an iCal server that I run. It's not nearly as good as Things was.

Not only did you digress (literally, right out of the gate) but you also failed to give any explanation for why and how you were hoodwinked by Apple. It just reads like a totally off-topic rant.

The topic is why I don't use Things anymore.

I initially thought the title referenced OS task managers a.k.a. system monitors.

My first thought was related to interpersonal relationships among certain people in management, and then the Windows utility of the same name. Definitely an unusual and bit clickbaity title.

I wished that was the case. I'd love a sane, modern replacement for the windows task / resource monitor.

What’s insane about the current one?

The standard task manager is extremely basic - the only reason I use it is to select a process to kill. The resource monitor on the other hand is clunky in behaviour (why are the handles not updated when I select an entry? why the extra step of a checkbox?), often confused (I've had multiple systems with CPU usage not adding up to the total, services missing from the list, etc.), and missing some behaviours (why can't I copy text/data from it?)

The Process Explorer from sysinternals is way better, but I also don't find it intuitive. Most sysintrnals tools seem to be a kitchen sink of awesome tools with no UX. Especially the Process Monitor filter setting dialog is annoying every single time.

Yeah, nobody really calls "to do list" software task managers...

Regarding not being able to adequately query Things 3, I'd point out that the full Things 3 db is a SQLite file on disk. So if you're happy to write a bit of sql you can query anything you want. Since the author already explored JavaScript for automation that might be an option.

Scripts can also use the things URL scheme to open items back in the GUI.

I'm working on an app that focuses on the "rituals" you mentioned, so I've been thinking a lot along these lines too.

Things and other similar apps are great for one-off tasks that possibly need to be done in the future ... the power to say "I want to do this in 3 weeks" but not have to think about it until then is hard to beat, and hard to properly articulate until you've experienced it. At the same time they aren't as good for routines where you want to tick off the same set of tasks every time, especially when the routine doesn't happen very often.

The app is in _very_ early alpha at the moment, but I'd love feedback if you're willing to give it a shot: https://checklists.fyi

This looks awesome. Great work!

I feel for the author. The space is so wide that an app needs to be either:

- totally customizable, which means a less cohesive UI, or

- extremely opinionated and you have to find the one that shares your opinions.

---

I wrote about my (similar) experience a few years ago: https://xavd.id/blog/post/my-perfect-task-app/

Things 3 has bar-none the best UI of any app. It's not perfect, but I surprised myself with how much I cared about that.

Agreed about Things. On the whole it has absolutely incredible... err I guess it's called Interaction Design

The fidgeting over todo list managers, optimizing for what? A theoretical 5% improvement in productivity from worst to best? It’s so undifferentiated.

I’ve always thought people who do things do it. People who won’t will look for every reason to do everything else, be it swapping bullet journal format every month, experimenting with new note taking strategies, configuring every dot file, and every text editor plugin.

When you are vesting into a tool which is going to be a core part of your workday it’s worth the time to make sure you get one that does what you want in a way that you like.

It’s not about a numerical gain, it’s more like making sure your shoes fit; if they don’t you are going to be uncomfortable for a long time.

Spoken by someone who clearly does not have ADHD.

I can say that sometimes "things just work" and that's what I'm always searching for. The thing that makes me not feel like "I wish this worked just a little differently".

I used to fiddle with fonts all the time, until I found Monolisa. I haven't fiddled with fonts in a long time.

I've found that for task organizing I have to have 2 levels. My todo lists for various "modes" (work, personal, kids/house), then another completely separate list of things I make at the start of each day. Still don't know of a tool that does that and I've just stopped looking.

Admittedly, I still fiddle with themes, plugins, etc. for code editing. :x Always after that 1 theme that will help me see everything on the screen at a glance without angry text (red text mixed in otherwise subdued tones) and covers all the different file types I use, appropriately. Just typing this out is making me wonder if there's a way to apply a different syntax theme to different file types. Hmm, about to waste another 20 minutes to an hour looking into that, I'm sure.

TL;DR I think the other person that answered this yesterday said it better than me "it's not about numerical gain, it's more about making sure your shoes fit".

i have the most simple note taking solution, which also doubles as my knowledge base.

I have a git repo, filled with folders. Organized organically. Sometimes I put "tags: todo" at the top.. so I can grep for it.

Other than that, I'm well aware of what i need to be doing without looking. If i have a lot of tasks I can't manage mentally, put make a todo list in org or just plain text and plug away at 'em.

I've wanted better tools but this workflow has worked for years. I use both emacs and sublime text to edit the notes.

I have a fairly small (but important) set of daily practices, like a 5K walk, every morning, combined with a slightly larger set of “heuristics,” like drinking water all day, standing at a desk, working in small, discrete steps (about hour-long chunks), etc.

But my “to-do manager” is a small Post-It note pad on my desk. It’s a live-action Kanban board.

WFM, YMMV.

How granulated are your tasks?

Fairly fine-grained, short-term.

The pad is for my daily programming tasks (and sometimes, other stuff).

I keep “the big picture” in my head.

It is not “watertight,” but it allows me valuable slack time, and I get a lot done.

Oh, the hours we could all save if we didn't spend so many hours reading about, trying, designing, and writing better todo apps. I'm sure somebody has an idea for a better kind of todo app that would help with this.

I asked a number of people I know recently who were high performers and to a man they said they used pencil and paper.

I love reading Evan Travers' blog. He always puts a lot of thought into things that I also want to improve at. I know that a lot of people on Hacker News are very much against productivity hacking, but I none the less want to find ones that work and help making navigating life a little easier for me. I especially like the stuff he's done with Hammerspoon [1] and always look out for the things that can make using a Mac easier or at least less frustrating in some cases.

Unsurprisingly he's also given a lot of thought about task management. It's something that I've never had lasting success with but from each failure I learn a little bit or benefit a little bit, so I keep on trying. At the very least, it's nice to read up on the development of various applications and if they stand out to someone whose opinion I value a lot in this space.

I use Things like he does, but I've never been able to stick to a routine with a set of daily tasks in the same way he apparently has. I often forget that it exists, even though it's one of the four primary apps on my iPhone. A lot of tasks input into are years old at this point. I'm not sure that switching task managers would actually do much anything to help improve my workflow, but I would be curious if anyone else on HN has any tips to making them more useful beyond writing down groceries.

[1] https://evantravers.com/articles/tags/hammerspoon/

> I've never been able to stick to a routine with a set of daily tasks in the same way he apparently has

Productivity nerd here, so I’m not criticising anyone. But…

Could this be because you simply don’t want to? My feeling is that we’re told that to be Good Productivity Nerds there are these things we have to do. Daily rituals, journaling, reviews … honestly, reading Evan’s post made me feel nervous. Like, when does the guy have time to relax? It’s all checklists and routines. Good god.

I get it, whatever works for you. It sounds like it works for him. But that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. Perhaps if you haven’t been able to keep the routine it’s because you don’t actually like the routine?

I do think it's possible that it's simply a matter of not enjoying it, but I also struggle with keeping up positive habits that I do enjoy as well. Figuring out how to get started and keep starting on daily habits is probably the hardest part of it more than the actual doing of it.

I don't really aspire to do everything that Evan or other GTD enthusiasts do, just small parts of it. Breaking down tasks especially and having a list as a source of truth would be really helpful, but I haven't yet figured out a good way of doing that.

Is it just me or are people massively overthinking note taking.

It's a lot more fun thinking about how you should take notes then actually writing them.

The article is about task management.

The routine he shares is very notes-specific.

The author is strongly influenced by bullet journaling, which merges note-taking with task management. See https://bulletjournal.com/pages/book

The original bullet journal method is paper-based, and its creator lays out reasons why it should be—the "friction" of the physical activity of writing and the time it takes is a key part of the method.

The Agenda app (https://agenda.com) comes close to bridging the notes-tasks gap in the same way as bullet journals. Emacs org-mode is the best simulation of bullet-journals, as far as I know, and there are are iPhone and iPad and Watch apps for org-mode.

Honestly a lot of those things listed just make my head spin, I guess i'm not a naturally organised or clear thinking person. People often think turning to these apps and systems is the answer, but I think they mostly just suit people that work that way anyway and they assume everyone else can just use them (Not saying this is the author)

But anyway, I think really you just gotta do things and adapt, all there is to do is to find something worthwhile to do for the next couple of hours and then to keep doing that, anyway. I think a lot of planning, task lists and tools are really just there to pacify you and help you feel less stressed about the nature of life and everything you have going on anyway, to give you some kinda fake sense of control

it's the Little structural things like loose connective tissue and mild centralization that guided me to what I currently use. At the moment, I recommend it.

I keep a daily journal / log thing. it's really just a monolithic text document that I can dump thoughts onto and not really meant to be accessed as a reference. Somewhere near the bottom (at the end of the last daily chunk) I have an EOD bookmark: `,./`. because I use vim bindings (emacs-evil) this allows me to gracefully jump to the place where I start writing every day. I have a key chord bound to insert a header with the date.

The interesting stuff happens just after that bookmark. I have two classes of thing here:

- a short TODO that represents the 'misc' one-off tasks (get check to irs, rotate tires, call that guy back) - these are things I'll hate myself for forgetting but don't want to stop what I'm doing to take care of in the moment.

- a series of headers representing deeper, longer work, with the URL of a file in that project that's structured mostly like my journal. This means I can break stuff up into subtasks with their own little todos and sub chunks, and I can navigate to those files without leaving my editor (again, vim bindings for goto -file).

The most important part of this system for me is how frictionless it is. `g-f` jumps to the devlog for the thing I want to be working on, `/,./` jumps to the current point of thought, and right below that is the itemized to-do. The thing that makes me keep using it is that it's fun to use - moving around is completely intuitive (to me) and I spend almost no time wondering where to put stuff.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend this specific set of shortcuts to someone else, but I highly recommend starting from the simplest, least opinionated method that works for you and building on it organically. I don't think I would have figured most of these tricks out if I had sat down and said "okay, time to make the perfect thing"

edit: `.,/` => `,./` because I wrote this on mobile and forgot the order.

it's amazing how much I just end up using apple notes and a paper notepad every day. everything else ends up being too heavyweight over time

I'm working on a concept at the moment which basically extends this.

The idea is to simply convert notes into work lists.

All the speed of working in plain text with the output being collaborative task lists.

Still a proof of concept at the moment:

https://app.usetempo.io

If anyone serious want to go down this rabbit hole I recommend https://www.outlinersoftware.com/ for a discussion of outliners, task managers, note taking apps etc.

Also (tooting my own trumpet) if you want to try something a little different look at https://www.hyperplan.com/, a card-based task manager for Windows and Mac that allows you to visually slice and dice your tasks in multiple dimensions (e.g. due date vs assign to, or assigned to vs urgency).

Not listed there, but I think Quire could be a good candidate. It's used here for both of those cases - planning tasks with assignment to people and recurring lists of tasks (start of the day, end of the day, monthly reviews, ...). It helps that things can be tagged / grouped and have an automatic repeat set.

It's not open/free, but... worked really well for us.

With taskwarrior, could you not implement your 'rituals' as recurring tasks, then just activate/deactive them as the "seasons of life" change. No mention of the web UIs or mobile apps built for taskwarrior either, kinda seems like he skimmed the GitHub readme and didn't explore further.

I currently use Zim + Syncthing and Deck + Calendar on my private Nextcloud.

We're trying to solve some of these problems with FocusTask (https://focustask.app)

Requires an email to try it :(

Your pricing page doesn't look right: https://i.imgur.com/G2Zh4Gu.png (safari and firefox same)

I'll plug my favorite, https://taskwarrior.org/

I've always wanted to try Things and omnifocus but am Windows based. Are there and windows functional equivalents?

I really wish one of these supported Windows!

I use Apple at home and Windows at work and my one requirement is for a solution that works between it all - I’ve purchased both Things and OmniFocus and they are both great but killed by a lack of windows support for me.

NirvanaHq is the closest I have found - It’s the best thing I’ve found that’s opinionated about GTD and truly multi-platform. Having said this, the second either Things or OmniFocus release a Windows app I’ll immediately jump to that.

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