My experience with taskwarrior

Introduction

After a month at new work I realized I need a good way to manage my tasks and things todo lists. Managing things manually is not exactly what I wanted to do and even through the main operating system at work is M$ Windows I decided to try my luck and compile taskwarrior within Cygwin which is luckily present.

After going through a bit of problems due to my lack of knowledge of how to do things under M$ Windows and to top it of I also added timewarrior. My primary reason for adding timewarrior is because I like graphs. Seeing colorred graphs representing my work is the best way how to end the month.

My workflow

I tried to use taskwarrior for personal tasks multiple times in the past but I did not managed to stick with it. Now as I started to use it at work I see the true potential and flexibility of this program.

At first I simply put in the main (read huge) task which should be completed and as I progressed I put annotations to it and created some small tasks around to help me switch focus a bit. The downfall of this strategy is that I ended up having this one task in my task list for a long time and as I progressed the number of annotations also increased and it was a mess.

It was a bit later as I again went through taskwarrior website and read the “Best practice” recommendations and realized how stupid I was. Now I create small tasks which can be cmpleted in a short period of time. I assign them to project according to my main task and add some tags to represent nature of what it is.

I am also slowly learning how to use other commands to manage “time” with taskwarrior like wait, until, some reccuring things and so on (go read manual).

Final thought

I am truly amazed that such a flexible program was laying in my computer for years unused.

Bonus

I truly love how timewarrior can be set to automatically exclude certain time ranges so I do not need to even move a finger to get a nice looking graphs and summary from it.