A year or so ago some co-workers pointed me at taskwarrior ( https://taskwarrior.org/ ) as a neat way to do todos and task tracking. At the time I tried to dive into it and it just didn’t seem to work out for various reasons ( I didn’t give myself free time to really dig into it, tried to make it do time tracking as well, etc). Last week and over this last long weekend I gave it another go and I think it may stick this time. I thought this might be a good time to share the tips and workflows I came up with in case anyone out there wants to give taskwarrior a try.
First a bit of background: I’m a sysadmin by trade, so my todos and tasks are often tons of short tasks and reminders along with meetings and longer term planning/thinking items. For many years my workflow has been to use my mail client inbox along with a text file for things. If it was in my inbox it means I need to take some action or reply to something. If it’s in the text file it’s something I have already done (to keep a record) or some short term todos of things that don’t have email associated. This setup works pretty well, but it’s bad at followups (where I replied/did something and the other party didn’t), anoying for repeat items (have to use a template for the text file or copy and paste), and bad at searching for particular things.
Enter taskwarrior: The new workflow I’ve settled on pretty much replaces my text file with taskwarrior, so I still have mail inbox, but taskwarrior helping it out. There’s extensive taskwarrior docs on the web and the man page is pretty nice too. It’s very nice that taskwarrior is flexable, it can be used a bunch of different ways with different workflows and methods. You can set things up to use it the way you want to. Above and beyond those things:
- Setting up meetings confused me, because I don’t want to see them until near the meeting time/day, until I realized I can use wait to make them wait until I want to see them. For example, here’s the EPEL meeting thats every wed at 18UTC: ‘task add ‘EPEL meeting’ project:work recur:weekly due:2016-03-30-12:00 wait:soww’ (soww is start of work week). So, I won’t see this on my task next list until monday when I am looking at my upcoming week.
- tags are very handy. For example I have been adding +nagios to any task where I am looking at or acting on an alert. That way I can go back after a while and look and see if there’s any trends or things we really want to try and fix because they re-occur. ‘task completed +nagios’ will show all these completed nagios tagged tasks. (likewise, ansible commits, bugzilla, infratrac and internal only tickets)
- ‘task edit <id|uid>’ is pretty handy to see what task has on a task or tweak it if you added it wrong.
- If you really do want to wait forever for something, you can use ‘wait:someday’ or ‘wait:later’ and it will set it to 2038. 🙂
- You can also add ‘until’ on meetings for example for just after they would end or the like, and task will delete that task if it reaches the until time. This is handy for example if you miss a meeting, you didn’t do it, it should just be removed, but you don’t even have to think about it if you add it with an until.
- Another cool one from Paul Frields: You can use ‘task log …’ to create a task thats already marked done. This is handy if you already did something and didn’t have a chance to make a task before hand. Saves you adding a new task only to mark it done.
- Out of the box, task doesn’t keep track of how much time you spent on any given task. You can use some hooks to record this, but it doesn’t do it by default. I think the last time I tried it out this might have confused me, but this time thinking about it, I am not sure I care exactly how many minutes I spend on each task.
- I’ve found it handy to add text as much as I can. When adding the task ‘task add …’ (describe it as simply and completely as you can), when starting the task ‘task N start …’ (usually here a link if it’s to a ticket or bugzilla thing where I know the url when starting)’, and when completing the task ‘task N done …’ (here a commit url or the like with the work done). Or ‘task N annotate …’ anytime you made some progress and it’s an interesting or noteworthy thing to add.
Taskwarrior does have a server you can sync to (taskd). It’s pretty easy to setup and uses TLS certs to authenticate clients. There’s also an android app, which is kind of painful to configure, but seems to work otherwise. I’ve not done all that much with it yet, but it might be handy if you are at a event or the like and want to record a task but don’t have your laptop out. There’s also bugwarrior that lets you pull from trac/bugzilla/pagure/etc into task. I did that the last time I tried things out, but I think it’s not a good workflow for me. When I do work on a ticket or bug I can add that task manually, and leave most/many of them that are not waiting on me to sit in their space.
Reports are quite handy for seeing how much you have done and what you have done in a time period, and pretty easy to setup. Just add them to your .taskrc with what to filter on and what cols to show. I setup one for what I have completed for the current work week and what I completed for last work week (useful in weekly reports to management).
Still getting the hang of things, but I am hopeful that I’ll stick with taskwarrior at least for now.