Introduction
Lately I discovered http://www.checkvist.com, an online outliner that can be used for task management. This tool does many things right and supports the keyboard lovers with extensive shortcuts.
This made me think about how cool it would be to manage my tasks within CintaNotes which has a better tagging system and doesn't store private data in the cloud.
Task management was the 4th most mentioned use case in the latest survey. But instead of submitting single feature requests I thought it would be a good thing to talk about a consistent concept…
At the moment I use 4 different tools:
- CintaNotes for storing details regarding tasks
- checkvist.com for managing complex tasks
- eMail to communicate about the tasks
- calendar to plan the tasks
Every tool I use is very good at what it was made for - but having distributed information to a task over 4 places is a problem on its own.
So the possibility to be able to manage the task in the same mighty tool (CintaNotes) where all the information is stored would be much appreciated.
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What Features would we need?
Lets start with a list of main featues such a task manager would need:
- a status (open, in progress, done)
- tasks and subtasks (breaking down a task in smaller pieces is essential)
- an overview of tasks and subtasks (see 'outliner' below)
many subtasks scattered around are of no real help
- a due date
- a view to show by due date
- reminders
- a priority
- and I am sure I forgot something
The implementation should make the usage of this features as comfortable as possible
- often the small details make something 'easy'
- e.g. in CintaNotes it is already possible to write a list in an 'outline' style
- - BUT there is no support to easily rearrange the list items
(e.g. intend, hoist, move in same hierarchy level, and so on .. ..) - e.g. in CintaNotes you can already manually create new notes as subtasks and link them to a summary list
- - BUT there is no easy way to create those notes (it's a full manually process - not like in a wiki)
- and more problematic you can't 'sync' the state of such a subtask with its task in the summary
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How could those be realized?
A picture says a thousand words....
So, what would we need to get there?
- Tasks within notes
- a feature like it is known from wikis would come in handy:
You add such a task within the note and as long as you don't click on it, it is the only repesentation of this task.
But if you click on the task it generates a new note in the background representing this task (and you can start adding additional detail information)
- this could be a general new feature not only bound to 'tasks'
- with all the new attributes needed, e.g.: status, due date, reminder, priority,…
What do you think?