Trying d-cubed for Task Management
I’ve been falling behind somewhat in keeping track of my tasks. That’s not to say I haven’t been productive, it’s just that most of my productivity has been focused in things I’ve been working on obsessively, like preparation for the roleplaying campaign I started running last week, Vim customization, and Python workflow coding.
It would be good to track other things better than how I’m doing it right now, but somehow returning to TiddlyWiki for my task management wasn’t appealing. I used it for quite a while, but a bare install of it doesn’t seem to quite work for task management, even though it’s still really good for keeping notes about things in general. I’m going to try d-cubed, a TiddlyWiki-based tool, instead.
One of the reasons for this is that I like a little organizational reward when I finish a task; I find that this kind of thing helps my motivation. This is partly due to my liking for lists (which may be related to my left-handedness) and partly due to the benefit of formally marking something as “done”. So a bare TiddlyWiki wasn’t quite structured enough for this, and I found that moving stuff around became too unwieldy. Instead of fixing the problem at the time, I gradually abandoned that list, and have managed mostly fine without it—but now occasionally forgetting an idea for a post is annoying me too much again.
Incidentally, this highlights my somewhat schizophrenic organizational state: various aspects of my life are either highly organized and usually stable that organized state, using some toolset that I’ve made work for me (like my blog, my subversion repository, tracking my CrossFit results, etc.); or are completely disorganized, with me getting by on them just by keeping stuff in my head and getting to it from time to time. The former is generally better than the latter, but finding the right tools for the right area isn’t always easy, especially when you’re as picky as I am (it took me a long time and quite a bit of research to settle on reStructuredText as my primary document format, for example).
In any case, I’ll see how d-cubed works; I might also try out Team Tasks, another TiddlyWiki-based tool.
During these trial periods, I’ll do my best to ignore the fact that I really want an API (preferably Pyton-based) to interact with TiddlyWikis via the command line, and that while some tools are close none match this requirement; I’ll eventually tackle that project if nobody else does, but adding another dependency in front of the task of keeping track of my tasks just doesn’t seem like a good idea, even if it wouldn’t be entirely out of character.