Monday, 2020 April 20
It took me less than one day to realize that Taskwarrior is not even going to come close to meeting my task management needs. The most obvious weakness: recurring tasks. I use recurring tasks very extensively, and I expect two basic pieces of functionality:
- A task that recurs after N days/on Y date, regardless of when I complete it. For example, if I have a reminder to send Dad a birthday card every year on February 6, I want that task to recur on February 6 next year regardless of whether I complete it early, late, or exactly on time.
- A task that recurs N days after I complete the precursor task. For example, mowing the lawn. If I have a reminder to mow the lawn every 7 days, but I'm two days late doing so, I don't want the next reminder to come up in 5 days, but rather 7.
Basically, I want two "modes" of recurrence - one based on the original due date of a task, and one based on the actual completion date of a task. Todoist does this via the "every" and "after" keywords - "do X every N days" vs "do X after N days". This works very well there.
Taskwarrior, on the other hand, only supports the first use case - which honestly I use less than I use the second. The more I dug into the docs, it's clear that recurrence was hacked on at some point and is not implemented cleanly. There is a design document containing a proposal to extend this, and I believe that if that proposal was implemented it would fulfill my needs. Unfortunately a quick browse of the open issues makes me think that there's no ongoing work on this front.
My next choice is Tracks, which I actually used prior to Todoist. I abandoned it years ago because development was very slow-moving and the app itself was buggy; as near as I can tell development has remained at a barely perceptible level, so I'm not eager to stand up an instance again. However, I'm not sure what else to try.
Update: Literally minutes after publishing this post, I ran into an issue that's described in the design doc linked above - recurring tasks play very, very poorly with syncing. I now have two copies of all of my recurring tasks, because I am syncing between two computers.
Sunday, 2020 April 19 Wednesday, 2020 May 20