Task management with Taskwarrior and Taskell

[link—standalone]

Those that know me know that to keep my ADHD in check, i need/use a variety of task management strategies.

It used to be post it notes everywhere, and a bullet journal, and to a point a lot of these things were very effective for me and to some degree or in some form i still make use of them.

But what about a comprehensive task management system for complicated projects, or multiple projects, with timeframe, dependencies, notes on tasks, or links to additional resources, burndown reports, or other types of reports, and most of all, in the command line, using just text in the terminal, that is both user friendly, and in an exportable data format and not a proprietary one? Enter TaskWarrior. This program is a behemoth of complexity but can be used simply. There is a plethora of functionality and unlimited possibilities for workflows that you can do with task warrior and it is a Great tool for more complicated project management.

With taskwarrior you also have the option of having extentions added to the program to extend the functionality of the program and in my case one such program i use frquently is called taskopen i use this to change the notes on the tasks to open markdown documents as the annotations so that each task can include a whole page of notes or more, and beyond markdown if you set the annotation to a URL taskopen will open the link in our default browser. The combo of taskwarrior with taskopen was a game changer for me.

Now with all that firepower sometimes with that increased complexity comes increased distraction which is what happened in my case. Taskwarrior is great but it was a little much for my daily chore and errand list and what other little items i wanted to deal with. It would have been better suited for a work environment for me personally. A program that does however fit my more basic needs in this regard is taskell its a task management program written in haskell, and it provides the ability to manage your tasks in a way that i like best: Kanban. So taskell is an ncurses based terminal application that is driven by a single markdown document, (though it is possible to use trello as a back end, only to populate the board initially) and have your tasks displayed in the kanban swimlanes.

Using Vim keybindings you can move, delete, update, undo, etc. to each of your tasks. Tasks can have due dates, sub tasks, & descriptions. It's just a more visual way of displaying and managing the tasks and information i need to quickly process and complete.

So thats what i use primarily for my task managment day to day, Taskwarrior, and taskell, you can watch my video about these programs here: Task Management Video.