Plain Text, Tasks, and Menu Bar Notifications
I made a quick spin through my various favorite task management applications again recently. I like experimenting with so many different applications for task management. At different times, I have made workflows around Evernote, Wunderlist, and TheHitList. I covered this over a year ago. For my personal system I keep coming back to plain text .taskapaper files and the Sublime Text Package PlainTasks.
One problem with putting tasks and due dates into plain text files is that it’s hard to get a useful sorted view of all tasks that are due today or overdue, the immediacy of due dates get’s lost in the noise of the lines of text. So I did something about it. I created a menubar application that scans a directory of files for .taskpaper and then compiles a nice list of all your tasks sorted by when they are due.
Get it here: https://github.com/sirtimbly/plaintexttaskmenu
I’m still working on packaging it (which should be simple because it’s all built on Electron) but, for now you can download that github repo, and run electron from your command line locally. It’s been working pretty well for me. My favorite part is that the app actually creates a sorted task-schedule.md and task-schedule.html file in the directory you scanned, so that the sorted task data can be consumed by other scripts and systems, or you can even print your html file each morning if you’re that kind of person.