AnotherKamila/tasksched

[idea]: Mindmapping-like interface to taskwarrior

evilham opened this issue · 1 comments

Sometimes filters are not enough and a huge list of tasks can be a bit... Overwhelming on TW and tasksched even with the search bar for filters which is pure love <3 (kudos to past me on that :-D).

I've been thinking about a way to have $something that makes things easier to navigate, an option would be a visual mindmapping-like interface.

Functionality wise, it would be absolutely necessary to:

  • Manipulate "blocks / depends" for tasks
  • Create tasks on-the-fly
  • Use the search bar for filters
  • "Zoom in and out"

It'd also be nice to:

  • Be able to schedule things from this interface
  • Be able to close tasks (should be added to tasksched's interface too :-D)
  • Have helper buttons for the filters based on the task / project.

There are some things that interact here:

  • Hierarchy
  • Task inter-Dependency

And different use-cases:

  • General overview (macro-managing/planning)
  • Planning (micro-managing/planning)

I think Dependency maps quite well to "blocks / depends" in TW and Hierarchy can be inferred from it: in the end tasks behave like a directed graph without cycles (I think! :-D am I wrong?).
To infer hierarchy from dependencies, we can think of hierarchy being inverse to the length of the longest chain of blocked tasks and dynamically be mapped to 3-4 levels. (e.g.: 0 tasks blocked by T means T has hierarchy 1 / top, longest chain of tasks blocked by T with length: 1-2 mean hierarchy is 2 / mid, with length 3-5 would have hierarchy 3/low and with length 6+ hierarchy 4/marginal).
Likely "Hierarchy" should be tunable as a TW UDA.

In a "General overview" mode, we'd emphasise tasks with a high hierarchy and in "Planning" mode items with a low hierarchy.

I think TW's priority wouldn't be fit for this "Hierarchy" concept, since that's more of an urgency measure which is correlated but not a direct mapping in most cases.

Does this at least kinda make sense? Is it worth exploring?

Does it sound like Too Much Work (tm) and maybe it's just better to use FreeMind?

It does sound like an interesting idea, though like everything else, it's blocked by the "what do we do with the UI?" thing :D

As for the "hierarchy", I am wondering whether the TW's built-in "urgency" attribute, which is computed from other attributes, could be useful. It does take task dependencies into account, and you can change the weight of that (https://taskwarrior.org/docs/urgency.html), thereby customising how important that is relatively to other things it takes into account. Could customising the urgency formula work, or do you think a separate attribute would be needed?