Adventures in TodoLand
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir, because I’m not myself you see.
~ Alice in Wonderland.
A long time ago, when I was still in school, I used pen and paper to make TODO lists. Stuff like “copy exercise #4 from V and submit tomorrow”. Yeah, I was kinda using GTD years before I heard the term.
Over the past five years, I have had a string of affairs with all the hottest todo apps out there - from Remember the Milk to Wunderlist, but I’ve remained married to pen and paper (or pencil and paper, just to spice things up every now and then). Nothing beats its simplicity, speed and flexibility, and crossing off items on a paper list is a great feeling.
Last week I think I finally found that one TODO app that’s closest to pen-and-paper. It’s called t. Let me warn you though, it’s not for everyone, but hackers should totally love it. It works in the terminal, and this is what it looks like:
adsahay$>t
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
Creating a new task is this simple:
adsahay$> t [dev] fix some bug
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
d - [dev] fix some bug
Done with a task? Strike it off the list.
adsahay$> t -f d
2 - [blog] post on todo apps
4 - [email] mail someone about something
Use all sorts of command line goodness to pipe the output of t to count the tasks in the list with wc -l or search by type with grep. Awesome, right? Wait, that’s not all. If you check out the t homepage you can see how to create multiple todo lists. It uses plain text files, so it’s easy to collaborate on a list by sharing a single file (for e.g., using Dropbox). Can you beat that?
Steve, the author of t, says this tool is for those who’d rather do things than organize their TODO list. So far he’s completely correct. Let’s see how long this affair lasts!
