Don’t Eat Rocks

With so many todo lists out there these days, why is it I find so many of them useless? It seems as if they’re always way too bloated, or their features are useless, or it has no features at all.

Some todo lists will force you to answer a giant multitude of questions any time you just want to say “Go get some milk.” How important is it? What’s it’s due date? Who does it involve? Who cares! It’s milk!

Then you’ll have the other todo lists which are too simple. “File report on VoIP Options” goes side-by-side with your milk, when this one obviously needs some more data, but there’s nowhere for that data to go.

Then, sometimes, you’ll find a happy middle ground, where you can enter in whatever data you need, but it doesn’t force you to. But in those situations, I almost always end up putting another ToDo list inside the “notes” section.

There’s only been one ToDo list that was actually any good, and that’s MyLifeOrganized. They introduced a feature that I simply fell in love with: hierarchical todos!

Think about it, Any time you have a big thing to get done, it usually involves many tiny things. Well, why not organize your todo list like that? It’s a perfect way of keeping yourself organized and on-task.

The only problem I had with MyLifeOrganized is that there was no way to keep track of how much time you spent on a particular task. This is pretty vital for me, as a freelance designer, since I need to give reports to most of my employers about how difficult or how long a project took. So, I set out to write my own program, taking the best of MyLife (hierarchy!) and adding a few things, and cutting out a few other useless things.

The result is TaskSheet. It’s pretty basic right now, it keeps track of your tasks in a hierarchical manner, and has a simple “change task” button to keep track of time spent. It’s the first program I’ve ever written, so it doesn’t have as many features as I’d like, but it is up to a point where it can be used quite well.

You can download the source, or the windows binary. The source should be able to run on Linux and Mac just fine with the command ‘python TaskSheet.py’. You may need to get wxPython first by typing “apt-get install wxpython” for debian-based systems, or “yum install wxpython” for RPM based systems. Windows users should just double-click on the .exe. Be sure to read the readme before you start.

Comments and feedback are greatly appreciated!

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