taskparser: keep notes and tasks together

Most users of note taking and task management applications, at least those that I personally interact with, appear to be content with keeping notes and tasks within separate apps:

Due to the inherent constraint imposed by their numerosity, tasks must usually be expressed with a certain degree of brevity, which limits the amount of information that each entry may carry. However, tasks are generally highly contextual; separating them from their originating contexts necessarily incurs in one or more of the following:

• increased mental load due to having to memorize all or part of the context of each task;
• increased task management complexity and effort due to varying levels of context duplication into the entry of each specific task;
• increased coupling between the note taking and task management solutions so that one may refer to information existing within the other and vice-versa.

I vastly prefer tasks to live within notes, alternating with blocks of free-form writing, so that each task is literally surrounded by the context in which it originated:

Mental load, however, is not the only reason why I prefer to keep tasks and notes together. Producing useful, actionable, well-described tasks tends to be an iterative process not dissmilar to other forms of top-down writing, starting with a general idea of what needs to be done and fleshing out each deliverable into smaller and smaller ones until we get to a size and level of effort that matches our expectations of what an individual task should look like. This essential part of thinking is enormously facilitated when tasks are allowed to live together with notes, simplifying switching between the two. Even when meeting remotely, I find that sharing this iterative refinement of free-form requirements into structured lists of tasks greatly improves participation and productivity.

Given that life requires some degree of context switching, however, our ability to efficiently prioritize tasks and understand out what our next item of work should be - and in which context! - depends on having access to an overall view of all of our pending tasks. This, I think, is the reason why most people seem to be content with the separation between tasks and notes. Whereas it might not be optimal, it is sufficient as long as it allows us to get an idea of what our agenda for the day looks like.

So, can we get the best of both worlds? More specifically, can we get the best of both worlds in a manner that is developer friendly, lightweight, extensible and doesn’t require an internet connection nor sharing our tasks with someone else?

Enters taskparser, a CLI tool that extracts tasks out of multiple Markdown documents and renders them in tabular or CSV form, supporting filtering and sorting through a tag-based approach that derives metadata from both inline tags and structured front matter.

Borrowing a term from the world of programming language compilers, I’d say that taskparser is a fully-bootstrapped task-management tool in that it’s already capable enough to be usable for managing its own development. Moreover, in the last few weeks I’ve been moving more and more of my task management to it, dogfooding as much as possible.

Though it’s still early-days, alpha-quality software, I hope that others will find it interesting enough to test out; feedback on real-life usage by others would be invaluable in shaping its evolution.

Interested? Check it out!