Whether you follow GTD practices or your own to do list formatting, to me that there are two basic requirements.
- Dead simple interface
- Easy capture of todos.
If these things don’t exist, it fails.
I’ve been a todo management software junky, trying out just about any desktop app or web-based tool that I can get my hands on. To name a few I’ve put Remember The Milk, Toodledo, OmniFocus, Things, Evernote, and GMail Tasks, through the paces. All these tools work, and to many, work well. I don’t even want to calculate how much I’ve spent on this habit.
The problem is that it seems that I keep trying these things out, buying new solutions thinking that the next one will fix my game, like buying a new set of golf clubs. It simply doesn’t work if you don’t already have the skills.
In the end, what it comes down to for me is that these specialized applications fall short because they all have interfaces.
Huh? Of course they have interfaces. A specialized interface provides features, menus, folders, editing, management, reminders, etc. But this is precisely what causes me to fail. They get in the way. They’re someone else’s idea of what works well as a task management system. Further, they’re yet another separate application or website that I must remember to access and use. They’re complex. And for tasks, todos, and getting things done, complex is the kiss of death.
I need something that is simple to use, free-form, and always available, even in the tools that I already use — a text editor. Just like we always seem to fall back on good old pencil and paper, just give me a simple text editor.
Todo.txt CLI
I’ve always thought that Gina Trapani was on to something big with her todo.txt command line interface for task management. But for me, the command line interface relies too heavily on having a terminal window and the command line as the primary interface. See, this is why we evolved from using command line editors like SED and EDLIN to vi, emacs, Notepad, TextMate, etc.
I will say that it’s about as close as I’ve seen to perfect because it doesn’t impose a method on you, and it does create a text file that’s human-readable that can be accessed and opened anywhere.
But to me, the todo.txt format just needs a little bit of formatting, and a little bit of functionality for organization that is cumbersome to get from a CLI. Though in the end, with some effort and customization, I strongly believe that I could make todo.txt work better than any of the OS X or web apps that I’ve tried so far.
That is until now.
Enter TaskPaper
TaskPaper is the best of both worlds. It uses a simple text file format as the data storage. You can edit this text file with any editor you want or even scripts (like todo.txt). This enables people to create powerful apple scripts to automate a lot of the common tasks. This text file format is well structured with projects as section headers.
The TaskPaper desktop interface itself is little more than a text editor. You can freely type in and edit your todo items. Simple formatting allows you to break things down into Projects, Tasks, Notes, and Tags. It is designed to be very “get the hell out of the way”, but when you need to narrow your focus, you can search for tags, projects or keywords. Mouse actions or keyboard commands are available to move things around and mark items as complete. You can fully implement GTD or whatever method you use for your own task management.
You can customize the look and feel. It comes with several themes, you can download more, or even make your own.
Here’s my favorite as it stands out from the rest of the apps on my desktop:
And if you want, you can open up your file with any text editor. TextMate has a special TaskPaper bundle that gives your file a little bit of the formatting that you can get using the desktop app. Here’s the same file opened up simultaneously in TextMate:
I’ll never back off from the premise that a text editor interface is the best interface there is, especially if it can be your own favorite editor. The TaskPaper editor, however, does have a few features to organize and capture. You can search and filter using some simple and powerful commands. in the search box. For example, the stuff that I’ve tagged to do today:
There’s a hot-key accessible quick-capture dialog available as well. By typing a configurable hotkey, you can bring up this for quick todo capture.
And beyond that, there’s a community of users providing their own themes and applescripts to automate actions, like capturing todos via email.
Todo List in the Cloud
But the magic of this is that by storing your todo text file in a shared location in the “cloud” you can access and edit.
I’ll be experimenting with storing my file in dropbox so I can get to it from the web, my iphone, as well as the multiple computers that I use.
The minute that dropbox comes out with an iPhone app that allows viewing/editing of files, this becomes a killer app, well, I think it already is.
Give TaskPaper a try. Or if you’re not (yet) a Mac user, try out Gina’s Todo.txt as it will work on any platform.
It took me 5 minutes to plunk down the $30 for TaskPaper. Actually, $25. Watch the screencast for a bonus coupon code.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
