I wrote a task manager (to-do manager) for myself on January 1, and have been growing it since then. The user interface is inspired by Taskwarrior, but I use an sqllite backend, and therefore it’s 300 lines of Python instead of 30k of C++. The small size allows me to be flexible in testing various ideas I have around task management—a new feature is usually just one or two SQL queries away.
My most promising exploration has been to not accept any tasks to be older than 2 weeks. If I haven’t managed to do it by then, there’s something wrong—it’s ill formulated, or there’s some unsatisfied dependency that I’m not clear about, or I don’t really intend to do it. I’ve developed a check list to go through to collect some stats about why tasks get to that point, with the intent to recognize them earlier.
One of my major failure modes seems to be to totally overestimate my capacity to deal with people the longer I think into the future—I’m totally sure I’ll be able to confront my landlord in a week, but not today. Much worse than the usual discounting happening all the time.
I was just thinking of exploring options in todo-list-management software, as there are a few features and algorithms I’d really like to see in such a program that I think might be really useful to help act and manage the todo list(s) more easily (would need testing, I’m not certain they would be, just a strong hypothesis).
I wrote a task manager (to-do manager) for myself on January 1, and have been growing it since then. The user interface is inspired by Taskwarrior, but I use an sqllite backend, and therefore it’s 300 lines of Python instead of 30k of C++. The small size allows me to be flexible in testing various ideas I have around task management—a new feature is usually just one or two SQL queries away.
My most promising exploration has been to not accept any tasks to be older than 2 weeks. If I haven’t managed to do it by then, there’s something wrong—it’s ill formulated, or there’s some unsatisfied dependency that I’m not clear about, or I don’t really intend to do it. I’ve developed a check list to go through to collect some stats about why tasks get to that point, with the intent to recognize them earlier.
One of my major failure modes seems to be to totally overestimate my capacity to deal with people the longer I think into the future—I’m totally sure I’ll be able to confront my landlord in a week, but not today. Much worse than the usual discounting happening all the time.
Nice! I’d be curious to see some of this.
I was just thinking of exploring options in todo-list-management software, as there are a few features and algorithms I’d really like to see in such a program that I think might be really useful to help act and manage the todo list(s) more easily (would need testing, I’m not certain they would be, just a strong hypothesis).