Keeping track of the current state of personal or work projects is a difficult challenge. Even though your brain can only focus on one thing at a time, it's rare for me to only have one thing on my plate at any given time. The projects themselves are also usually comprised of subtasks that I can't do all at once but at least need to record them in a way that ensures I won't forget to complete them later. With multiple active projects I find myself needing a way to record the state of progress so I can pick up where I left off.
This is easier said than done however. There are lots of available tools and systems (i.e., ways of using those tools) to choose from and even though using them is far better than not using anything they often feel tedious to maintain or incomplete. I wanted a system that would require minimal maintenance so I could focus more on the work that actualy matters.
After countless attempts to cobble together systems from multiple different commercial tools I eventually decided to just try and build something myself.
My solution leans more towards power users. In my mind these are the users that are willing to read documentation about at tool to master it. Tools like these usually have much cleaner interfaces because there isn't an expectatation to cram everything on one screen to make it "intuitive". For example, Microsoft Word and Vim are both text editors. But the latter requires some up front work to be able to use and master its capabilites. Despite the upfront investment with Vim it is highly praised for its usefulness and simplicity.
With my tool the features are not always obvious, and you may have to read my docs to understand how to obtain certain benefits. For example, in some tools there is a concept of reacurring reminders like replacing the air filter in your house every 90 days. You don't want this to just be a notification that you might miss or overlook beacuse you were busy with something else when the notification was recieved. You want to make sure that its something you get done even if it ends up taking you a few days to get around to doing it. There is no primitive concept of reacurring reminders in my app, but I do use them by leveraging the mechanics of the snooze feature. Lets say I have a task to replace the air filter in my house. I complete the task, but instead of marking the task as complete I snooze it for 90 days. When 90 days elapses the task comes back into focus and I get around to completing it again. When I go to snooze the task again the duration of 90 days will already exist in the form input because the app assumes that since you snoozed this task before you likely want the same duration again for the snooze duration. The combination of the snooze feature and default snooze value being the last duration used gives you the reacurring reminder capability without having to learn a completely seperate feature.
A project is anything that requires a person to complete an action. It can be as simple as purchasing milk from the supermarket or it can be something complicated like building a software application.
Knowledge Archive (i.e., Wiki)
I often see commercial organization tools try to blend both concepts of task/project management and knowledge tools together into a single experience. For example, these tools allow you to take notes and then embedded todo items in those notes. I think this strategy is a mistake because I see two kinds of documentation that have very different lifecyles.
The first is working documenation. This is where you write down everything, all ideas regardless of good or bad, tasks you need to complete, people you need to talk to, addresses, links, phone numbers, etc. This information is very loosely structured because you are recording it as fast as you can since your are collecting it as you are working on your projects.
The second is reference documentation. These are much more refined documents like how-to guides, onboarding wikis, contact sheets, migration checklists, design diagrams, etc. These documents differ from working documenation in that they are refined for repeat consumption over long periods of time or even mass consumption. Short hand notes are not acceptable in these docs you must really consider your audiance and even test that these documents are achieving their desired effect. Also, you will continue to refine them as you learn new things or processes change.
This tool is not targeting reference documentation. You should be using it for working documentation only. All the data entered into this app is just to support the projects you are working on. For example, completed tasks will be perminantly deleted after remaining in a completed status for more than 30 days. The reason for this is more than simply saving disk space but rather to cultivate a mindset that you don't need to collect everything. Temporary information is extremely useful but only for so long, eventually its just clutter that you need to get rid of. This doesn't mean you can't record ideas or concepts in this app that you plan on using forever. It just means the app itself isn't the artifact your aiming for. You should use this app to help you produce those documents/wikis and put them in a place (not this app) so you can easily reference them later.