Show HN: General Task, a free task manager for builders (beta)

Looks really nice. Here's my feedback to another app maker that would make any product in this category into a killer tool:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32313583

I’ve tried a lot of apps like this over the years. Two main things I’ve struggled with with all of them:

1) none seem to handle multiple calendars well. I have a personal calendar, a work calendar, and a side project calendar, I want them all to be independent, have tasks blocked out on them, etc, but still be aware of each other. So for example, I want to schedule a doctor’s appointment on my personal and have my other calendars mirror that time block, but scrub the details/make it generic. Super specific idea obviously, but if I don’t have it I have so much manual overhead aligning everything that I just give up and do it by hand.

2) they are all dogshit slow (not sure about this one, haven’t tried it). The combo of electron apps and what I guess is just calendar synchronization latency makes them have surprise ux patterns and overall just shitty experience in general.

A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.

Last: my notes live separately (as most people’s do I’ve seen anecdotally).

I hope someone can really succeed in this space because time blocking is so powerful, but nothing has fit my lifestyle quite right yet unfortunately."

Thanks for the feedback, this is super helpful to us! We are working to improve our multiple calendar support soon and always keep performance top of mind.

Some further feedback, not specific to your tool but because I've seen a few of these recently and would love to find a tool that meets my needs, it's maybe worth saying now-

When I see responses like this, instinctively my internal reaction is: "Okay, so they don't have this and say they're working on improvements, but I don't know how effectively they build new features or when this might be released. Will it be a week? A month? 6 months?"

I don't know the best solution, but having some more information to answer this would keep me more engaged with products that are being actively developed. I don't want to get bought in to something that iterates at a snails pace, but I could commit myself to trying tools that rapidly iterate and improve..

There's definitely something there - we've thought about this on the team too. Maybe publicly committing to ship features by certain dates?

nah that's going to bring a lot of pain to your world.

Go read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Product-Roadmaps-Relaunched-Direction...

It's hands down the best approach to roadmapping out there.

The tl;dr:

Commit to Outcomes (future states of the world your product can create that don't exist today, and have meaning for your customers) without committing to solving for those Outcomes in any particular way.

So something like "It's easy for customers to get their data out of the product to feed into other applications" is an Outcome, and the Outputs can be all sorts of things: APIs, Direct Integrations to Other Apps, Excel exports, or just a dumb form for them to request the data and you have a SQL script you run to do it because it just doesn't happen enough to warrant the investment.

Happy to help.

If you want an advisor of some sort who is a career product leader, does sales now, has an insane schedule, and is also a father of a young kid so has a crazy personal life, I’m your guy. My Twitter handle is in my profile here.

> A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.

I feel exactly the same, and haven't been able to figure out how to make it work using any combination of Notion, Todoist or Trello.

Todoist with project sub-groups of "backlog", "in-progress", "blocked" and "recurring" is about the best I've managed, but I think I've just gotten too habituated to giving every task a date and managing things from the "upcoming/this week" view. Making better use of sub-tasks might help, but then you end up needing to have a kanban board within a task for managing the sub-tasks...

Try TickTick? I've run with pretty much all the to-do apps over the years but TT has nailed it for me. Calendar integration, kanban view, tags, lists, markdown, etc etc

> I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.

Well said. I pay for Trello premium solely for the scheduled checklist feature, but it’s clear that this is not a top priority for them to flesh out as you described.

I would love to find a service that combined Trello’s kanbans with Microsoft Todo and offered a tight mobile integration for reminders and widgets and the like.

Yeah, I actually pay for Trello premium too because of recurring tasks! I use General Task at work but still Trello for personal stuff. We are actively working on recurring tasks now and are definitely interested in exploring a kanban-style view in the future as well.

You can give v1 of Atomic - AI scheduler (https://atomiclife.app), a try for handling multiple calendars (still in Beta). Working on v2 for client or team meetings and autopilot. It will be targeted for solo developers/ indie hackers / small teams

If you want to follow my work on the project (I #buildinpublic) - go here: https://twitter.com/rish1_2

What's with all the excessive Google permission request ????

  Select what General Task can access:

  - Associate you with your personal info on Google

  - See your personal info, including any personal info you've made publicly available

  - See your primary Google Account email address

  - View and edit events on all your calendars

This is too much to ask just to sign up.

Those first three are the basic default Google sign-in permissions (IIRC). The first is your Google ID, the second is your name, and the third is your email address. The fourth permission is so we can show your calendar and allow you to modify it. The app still works if you disable calendar permissions, though. And we will add alternative login methods in the future for those who would rather not authorize their Google account.

These are the typical standard permissions:

'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.readonly', 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.events', 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/contacts.readonly'

This is what I use for my time blocking app project. Contacts are scheduling meeting / events which might not be needed for this project so top two is what I would use for the project

It looks good, very similar to Emery. I have a few suggestions:

- I want this to work offline, or I will never pay for it. Many reasons:

-- No way I'm sharing my work calendar with you(your service) my dude, is actually against company(Google) policy. Many engineers at FAANG and FAANG like (big tech ) companies will love to use such tool(at least I will), they can afford it, and many of them have a strong online presence and can advertise your product for free ( the same way they do it for Obsidian, for example). So you pretty much dropping a huge chunk of your customer base.

-- User's data belong to them, many people organize their lives with this type of tool, and what they write there, is not our concern nor you should have access to it.

-- Is not too hard to implement client sync, and you can actually offer it as a premium feature.

- I know you are just starting up, but maybe you can offer a free trial without logins, so people can try your products without having to make a fake account?

- Also, a way to import calendars from Exchange, Apple, Google, ...

Congrats for the launch, it looks good. I will follow your journey, if the product change, I will buy it for sure. Love to support small hackers.

Thanks for the feedback! It's free by the way!

*you only pay with personal information that can/will get monetized later on (bait and switch)?

I personally would like to try it, it does touch a nerve. But I only use selfhosted services. Have been burned in the past by "free" services that went away.

We don't and won't monetize personal information. Our plan is to launch a paid product for businesses next year.

First thing I always wanna know with these things is what happens with my data after your servers die? Can I export it? Do you have any API endpoints I can use to hack things my own way? Who really owns it?

---

Mentioned apps with how they handle your data:

• [General Task](https://try.generaltask.com/) – free, proprietary § ???

• [Emery](https://emery.to/) – $7/month, proprietary § Data lives on their server, when your subscription expires your account goes into read-only mode and can still view your data

• [Atomic](https://www.atomiclife.app/) – free tier, proprietary § ???

First thing I always wanna know with these things is what happens with my data after your servers die?

Why? How often does anyone do anything with the data they've exported from some service?

Maybe it's just me. But I feel like starting over setting up all your to-do tasks and what-not is going to take less time then writing some script to parse data from one format and upload it to some new system. Especially given that there will be a delta in featuresets.

I definitely do so. I've tried half a dozen podcast apps in the past decade and being able to export my subscriptions as an opml or otherwise is something I pay a lot of attention to now. I've had to webscrape or do some really hacky things to access my data one too many times

Similar for notes and todo apps. I like to pull my data in, analyze it, visualize it, convert it to other formats, etc

Even when I don't yet have specific plans for my data I like to know I can pull it in and make local backups

We don't have a public API yet but you can look at the network tab in your browser and get your tasks in JSON format relatively easily.

I like the look of it, and "single-tasking" is great. It also can block out your calendar so you get less random meetings popup.

But I can't see any info on pricing? I see "free to start!" but always worried about roach motel business models - esp since the TOS is soooo detailed this doesn't seem like a happy hacker side project? Am I the product, or just too cynical nowadays?

update: after reg i see:

> That means we will be keeping our personal productivity solution free forever.

so i guess that means you're banking on a 2B version later?

Thank you! You are not the product. That's correct, we will release a paid product for businesses next year.

I'd be much more likely to buy this if it were a local application.

At large companies, it's not uncommon to have a security policy that forbids using 3rd party SaaS apps that haven't been formally blessed by IT. Getting that approval is a herculean task.

For a task manager I'll use at work, anything that's running in the cloud is essentially off limits as a result.

Hey, thanks to those who pointed out the back-button override bug. We've just shipped and verified a fix for that!

Dang I was super excited to try it but I can't use Google. Are there plans to add any other means of signin soon?

We definitely will be adding other signup options, no ETA on it yet though!

Thanks looking forward to that and some clarity on pricing.

It's free forever for individuals, and we will roll out a paid business product next year.

Really love the idea of single tasking! All this talk about how to multitask more efficiently gets old pretty quickly

Thanks so much - agreed!

Looks useful, trying it out. Feature request (once you recover from the hug of death): I'd like to be able to drag emails onto my calendar in addition to Linear issues and Slack messages. Right now it's common for me to have a "reply to x" item on my todo list.

Thank you! Yes, we are very keen on adding better email support over time!

Looks slick and feels super fast.

One thing I like about Linear is having multiple accounts/workspaces and easily switching between them. As someone who manages multiple Gmail accounts and projects, this would be a nice feature. Totally understandable why it's not in the beta, though.

Thank you! I'll pass that suggestion along, thanks for the feedback.

I think you have a client/server timezone mismatch. When I add a due date, it's momentarily correct, then goes back a day (eg. from tomorrow -> today). I'm in AEDT (currently GMT+11)

What's the best way to report issues once this thread has gone stale?

Thanks for the feedback - I just passed along to my team! We have a "share feedback" button in the bottom of our sidebar where you can report any issues you have as well.

Just by way of feedback, tried it on my iPad and found it didnt work well enough in Safari for me to want to keep struggling with it. Found drag/drop worked inconsistently, struggled to change task durations on the calendar etc.

Oh, good to know, thanks for sending this feedback over! We haven't tested much on iPad / mobile yet.

I clicked on this thinking it was one of the rare HN projects that is for the "real world" (ie built for an industry that isn't technology) but 'builder' mainly means programmer here, not construction.

Looks slick otherwise.

Ah yeah sorry for the confusion, we decided to start with programmers but want to eventually build a tool that works great for everyone.

Calendar integration looks nice; if I ever become a freelancer this is exactly the sort of thing I'll be reaching for. Sadly, many of us are stuck with Outlook - so won't be able to use this app to its full potential.

Thanks! And that makes sense - we'll have to add Outlook / alternative login options soon!

I'll be honest, you had me sold when you mentioned "single-tasking".

Haha amazing!

This looks really cool and something I would use, but I'd need to see more on data retention and security. Just by nature of the product it requires sharing a lot of potentially very sensitive information.

Thank you! That makes sense. What do you think would make you feel better about our data retention and security? Would something like SOC-2 compliance be helpful?

Data policy, knowing what and how data is stored, would be good enough

Got it!

Looks good! Once another sign up becomes available I’ll give it a look

Thanks! We'll have to add that soon!

Looks promising. The task/calendar linkage is a good reflection of how I like to organise my day.

Any plans to extend the Github integration to Issues in addition to PRs?

Thank you! That's a good suggestion, our next integration is JIRA but we'll definitely add Github issues at some point as well.

This is a solid take on task management. We've got some similar features in https://hourstack.com with dragging and dropping tasks from other platforms into a calendar (team or personal). However, our focus is on tracking time against those tasks once scheduled and then reporting, invoicing, etc. against the work completed. So different end goals.

Best of luck to you as it looks like you've got a great start.

Cool, thank you, and best of luck to you too!

Awesome! Any plans for a mobile app, or a PWA?

Thanks! Definitely at some point, just not sure exactly when yet!

What is the distinction between the normal parts and the all-caps portions of the Terms of Service?

This was something our lawyers recommended. I'm not sure exactly why we do that, but my guess is to emphasize certain parts.

Lawyers before a pricing page, that's interesting. Is this a VC-funded or bootstrapped project?

Yep! Our product is free for individuals (paid product coming later for businesses), so we didn't add a pricing page quite yet. We've raised money from friends and family and a couple of funds but consider ourselves pre-seed currently.

> Yep! Our product is free for individuals (paid product coming later for businesses), so we didn't add a pricing page quite yet. We've raised money from friends and family and a couple of funds but consider ourselves pre-seed currently.

Congrats on the launch, thanks for the response

Thank you!

It's funny because it also makes it unreadable.

What is the distinction between the purple text and the black text in the Terms of Service?

Oh whoops, that's a bug. We're having someone fix it now!

Was that from edits made?

No, it's just a styling bug, as far as I can tell.

Looks nice, but I've become kind of jaded on 'task/time management' as a concept. At least for me (and maybe others) I don't want to micro-optimize my day. I'd rather have more room for spontaneous creativity and fun. I don't want to feel like I'm on an assembly line being fed things to do one at a time.

And I've also found that focusing too much on small details can cause you to miss big picture work that has much more effect. For example, you optimize preparing for a meeting, but you don't stop to think "maybe I don't even need this meeting?". Or you have very detailed implementation for some feature, but you don't think about maybe a different feature would be more valuable.

I have been casually thinking of what a task management solution that encourages more spontaneous and creative work would look like.

I totally agree. I think it's crucially important that every detail can be backed up by a long term goal and that you have the freedom & visibility in your tracker to make that happen.

We wanted to start by doing the fundamentals very well (tasks, basic calendar, etc), but we are very excited to push the envelope of what a task manager does over time and help align your short term actions with what can most effectively advance your goals in the long run.

Have a technical platform that encourages you to be spontaneous sounds a bit paradoxical, but maybe it could do it in a subtle way - so that the user does the creativity part, not being fed "creativity slots" on a conveyor belt like the previous concept. It's worth exploring.

I hate to be the first comment and be negative, but pleease dont hijack the backbutton.

Yeah, I just noticed that a couple days ago - it's a bug and definitely not our intention to do that. Will let my team know about it now!

Edit: it's fixed now

What’s up with all the task managers lately? This feels like the fifth I’m seeing in the past 2 weeks.

It's a crowded space for sure! I personally think productivity is a really important problem facing society and so I don't mind that so many people are trying to do something about it.

Love the idea. Item becomes a specific calendar thingy. Great job.

Please fix the back-hijack to HN though. (it's like forwarding twice for some reason)

edit: I see you're aware of it!

Thank you! And yes, we're having someone look at that right now, sorry about that!

Edit: it's fixed now