Sunday, 2020 April 12
I've used Todoist as my primary task manager for at least six years and I've been a premium subscriber for almost that entire period. I was initially attracted to it by the fact that it had a powerful text-based interface for adding tasks; I could type something like "Take out the recycling every two weeks starting on Thursday" and it would properly set up recurrence and the initial date.
I've been growing increasingly unhappy with it lately following some UI updates to the web interface. They mostly stem from the fact that Todoist, for better or for worse, seems to be adding features that I don't need or want, and that has meant that the workflows I do most have started requiring additional clicks to perform. I'm not alone with my dislike, but the CEO of Doist (the company behind Todoist) frequents Reddit and has made it quite clear that the current interface is the way forward.
I've been kicking around some ideas for writing my own task-management software for about four months now and feel like I have some nice innovations, but I don't have the time to tackle that project right now. So I started looking around at alternatives. Most of current crop of task managers are either too simple (they don't support recurrence, they don't have the concept of a "project", etc) or else too complex (supporting teams, complex project management workflows, etc).
I had been looking at online solutions, both "in the cloud" and self-hosted. Somewhat by chance, I happened upon a reference to Taskwarrior, a CLI task manager that I've used intermittently in the past (mostly at Indeed) but which had slipped my mind. I was vaguely aware that it supported task syncing, and I knew that it offered a lot of the features that I'm interested in.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of giving Taskwarrior a solid try. I tend to favor CLI tools, running my own sync server would be no big deal, and it would be totally self-hosted. I resolved that I was going to set it up as soon as time allowed.
Saturday, 2020 March 21 Sunday, 2020 April 19