Taskwarrior and Getting Things Done

One of the tenets of the productivity oik David Allen’s philosophy of, well, productivity is that one should clear the mind of all tasks that are floating within by committing them to paper, thereby freeing up valuable brain cycles that were previously spent on worrying about what to do, and spending them entirely on doing them - or at least, slaking through a prioritised list and doing such things one by one.

Curious about tools that could assist this task, I came upon Taskwarrior. Using brew to automate the compiling process on OS X, I installed this minimal, command-line based, task manager. Mistakenly, I thought that **task **was a ncurses-ish interactive application but it turns out, it’s run on a line by line basis.

For example:

task add Do laundry

task 1 modify priority:H project:exams +tag2 +tag2

task ls

The first and second commands are easy enough to understand (tasks are given integer IDs). The third command lists all tasks in compact form.

At the moment, it’s helping. A rather sophisticated program, taskwarrior can handle dependent tasks, due dates, calendars, an infinite undo history and syncing functionality (you can, for example, host your taskbook remotely and RSYNC your local copy at the start of every session). Worth a look.