task

From IndieWeb

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A task is a note about something that you need to do, are doing or have done. The specifics for a task beyond a general h-entry text-based note still need to be developed through experimentation.

Why

What is the point (or goal) of (publicly?) posting a task?

What should consuming code do when it discovers a task post?

How to

See #Brainstorming for now.

IndieWeb Examples

In rough launch/implementation order:

Eddie Hinkle

Eddie Hinkle started posting occasional tasks to his site on 2017-05-15. His current approach is to add task-status to the h-entry to denote if that h-entry has one of three statuses: planned, in-progress or finished. Eddie uses tasks for regular notes, listen posts, and watch posts.

Silo Examples

See also:

OmniFocus

needs more research

2Do

needs more research

GitHub Issues

needs more research

Habitica

Task managing silo with gamification

needs more research

Wunderlist

Things 3

Things 3 is a task manager for macOS. It has it's own cloud system, but no interactions with other users, so might not be considered a silo.

A task in Things 3 has the following:

  • checkbox
  • name (big, shown in lists)
  • notes (autolinks URLs, but also capable of internal links to e-mails, documents etc. within macOS)
  • when (a 'start date': if this is in the future, the task is hidden from the 'anytime' list, but shown in the 'upcoming' list under that date). Can be:
    • Today
    • This evening (just a separation of the Today view)
    • Tomorrow / a date from the picker
    • Someday (no specific day, hidden from any list and available via the 'Someday' list. These tasks get a light grey dotted checkbox when shown in projects.)
  • reminder (there is a button to 'add Reminder' in the when-picker)
  • tag (from a list, can be created on the fly and filtered)
  • checklist (a few subtasks containing only a name and a checkbox)
  • deadline (pick a date from the picker and it still add a flag with the number of days until deadline. will be red if approaching)

Tasks can be part of projects. Projects can be grouped by 'Areas of responsibility', which are just subheadings for projects in the sidebar.

Brainstorming

Challenges

Usually such task tracking systems are so personal that there's not as much opportunity / incentive for formats for interoperability across different implementations / people etc.

Start with wikifying

As a positive step forward, take a look at what a bunch of us are using our User: pages for on the IndieWeb wiki for tracking our "Working On" and "Itches" etc.

In general, if you're looking to work on a format for sharing information, start with just sharing the information with simple text and see how that works in practice.

Reading use-case as inspiration

See read#gRegor_Morrill_thoughts for how the act of reading a book is being captured by folks in their posts, with proposed markup as well.

Can this approach be generalized for any task?

e.g.

  • *-status: indicates the status of the task:
    • values: to-start, in-progress, and finished

See also the h-entry issue on read-of, especially this comment from Chris Aldrich regarding generalizing to all media you might read, watch, or listen to:

Communal tasks

See also:

  • to-do - IndieWeb community related tasks to help out with!

See Also