My Workflow- Tasks

TaskPaper

I discovered TaskPaper about 4 weeks ago. Used the trial for a week before I bit the bullet and purchased a license. From the time I first laid eyes on it, TaskPaper just felt right. Why? Because it's simple. Plain text simple. Yes it stores the whole project/task/notes list as one text file. You can even copy/paste out of it into another app (more on that later).

Here is a simple example:

Project Name:
- This is task number one @MIT
- This is task number two
Evan felt like this was really important

Basically a project is any name ending with a ':', a task is text starting with '- ', a tag is any word starting with '@', and a note is anything else. You can, of course, nest projects/tasks simply by indenting. Click on the '-' and the task gets tagged with '@done' and the theme (oh yea, it's theme-able) styles it to be crossed out. One final thing, when you're done with a task (or a bunch) you can simply archive them. This tags each of the tasks with '@project(PROJECT NAME)' and moves them to the bottom of the file under a project names Archive.

How it works for me

I try and keep tasks associated with a given project. If a task doesn't belong to a project, I put it in a project called "Inbox". Every tuesday at work we have our department meeting. From tuesday to tuesday I spend my time working on tasks and archiving them. Each tuesday, I just gather all the Archive tasks and I... oh wait I am getting ahead of myself.

Notational Velocity

I have used Notational Velocity off and on for a while now but lately I have really begun to hit my stride. I have moved from Evernote to NV + Dropbox for all of my digital data storage needs. This app is great because with a ⇧⌘V (system-wide shortcut to bring NV forward) and then a ⌘L (NV command for search), I can search for anything and if it doesn't exist, create a file with that name. It is great.

How it works for me

This is where all of my archived tasks go each week, right into Notational Velocity with a tpa, I get '20101124-N2 TaskPaper Archive', hit enter, and paste. The problem is, this output is rather ugly, not great for reference, and horrible for scanning in the meeting.

MultiMarkdown

MultiMarkdown is a way of styling text which allows it to stay in plain text, easy to read, and translatable into multiple formats. MMD is a subset of the awesome language Markdown created by John Gruber. MMD adds some much needed abilities, like tables and scripts to output to PDF and HTML (this blog post is written in MMD and transcoded to HTML).

How it works for me

I take all of my (non-simple) notes in MMD. I also transcode my TaskPaper Archives in Notational Velocity into MMD.

Automator

Wow.

How it works for me

First, I created a Text Service to transcode TaskPaper Archive format to MMD. Then, I created a custom XSLT and another Text Service, which together create a PDF from any selected MMD formatted text and open it in Preview ready for printing.

Update 12/02/2010
The Text Service to format a TaskPaper list into MMD is here.