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Comment by jecxjo | Hacker News Reader

I use to use Taskwarrior, using all its features until one day my work life lost all complexity. At that point I felt like all the key features of Taskwarrior were lost because I just didn't have enough complication to track.

Now I just use todo.txt and that seems to cover everything I need.

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Do you mean the "todo.txt" CLI (https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli), or just a file you edit manually?

I've used the todo.txt CLI on and off, sometimes in collaboration with my (shameless plug) "friends" CLI (https://github.com/JacobEvelyn/friends) for "tasks" that are social in nature. But I always seem to come back to paper todo lists.

I actually wrote my own in Haskell, but really I just mean the structure. I no longer need huge ordered lists of blocking dependencies. I loved that taskwarrior did that, but once your life becomes less complicated, all the cool features seemed to get in my way. I wanted burndown charts. I wanted an app to figure out what tasks were highest priority based on how much time they could take and deadlines. But once you no longer have any of that...it is basically todo.txt

Edit:

I should also add that with my daily life (outside of work) I'm strictly a pencil and paper kinda guy. I hate when my phone dies and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do today.

Might as well return the shameless plug with my own (https://github.com/jecxjo/todo.hs)

Thanks for all the info! Glad to hear I'm not the only pencil-user on HN :)

There are some extensions that bring task dependencies to todo.txt. IMHO outlines are a quite natural extension of the original format that can be used for that without making things too complicated.

I totally agree. I am currently trying to figure out how to best do that with todo.txt with the minimal amount of dependencies. I liked in taskwarrior how all the tasks were numbered and could be referenced, but it required a big infrastructure in taskwarrior, which is more painful in todo.txt.

There is no use in numbering tasks in todo.txt files. But you (as a developer) can create an id based on the current time stamp and the tasks content that can be referenced later on. The VIM ttodo_vim plugin does it this way.

How did your work life lose all of its complexity? I long for a single todo.txt, but have settled on a directory of org-mode files :)

At one point I was the sole engineer on two very large hardware/software projects. Projects that often didn't have dedicated marketing, sales, tech support, internal/external training. So I was wearing a LOT of hats, and I needed a way of figuring out how to be one of the most productive people in the company (for my own reasons) while also only doing the bare minimum of work.

Then one day the company decided they would completely change direction, dropped all future development on current products and moved everyone to their next gen product line. Turns out my two major projects wouldn't have next gen work for 3 to 5 years so I was "demoted" to a "gun for hire". I went from doing way too much work, to filling in the gaps when a team needed to complete a sprint on time. None of my work more than a few days, had no blocking dependencies and had no correlation to what I was going to do next week.

No more burn down, no more charting, no more task management. That is when I decided to change jobs. Now I' have some complexity, but its all easily managed in todo.txt.

> That is when I decided to change jobs.

I was really hoping that was going to be the conclusion, for your sake :). That sounds like an incredibly demoralizing experience.

Actually, because I was at the point where so much stuff was automated, and I had taskwarrior deciding just how much work to do every day...I had a lot of free time to do whatever I wanted to do.

Mostly I left because the pay was lousy and I had been doing it for almost a decade and a half. That was the final straw when I realized I couldn't ask for a raise because they weren't giving me enough work.

Overmanagement separation anxiety? ;-)

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