One of the ever present things on my mental to-do list is to find, or create, a good task manager. A number of years back I became painfully aware that I can’t remember everything I need to do unless I write it down. I’ve tried a number of things, although I haven’t exhausted all the possibilities, by any means.

The first attempt at solving this was a perl cgi scripted todo manager based on sample code for a guestbook in Learning_Perl. It worked great :) but the whole experience was a little unfulfilling (you could never delete things ;( ). I tried a number of other things – iCal, kalendar, and devtodo (a nice program, worth checking out if you’re interested in a filesystem-based console tool). But recently I stumbled on an approach that hadn’t occurred to me in the past.

I’ve started using a vector-drawing program called Inkscape to manage tasks at work. It started when I started using Inkscape to sketch portions of a software system I am implementing. Once the design phase was somewhat solidified and implementation began I started marking things off right on the document. Inkscape is handy for this because you can just create a new layer of the document and put transparent shapes on top of the portions that are done. I’ll try to get a screenshot up soon, but I don’t have a usable scenario right now).

The result is a very spatially-dependent interface that is not inherently linked to time. For some domains I think these are desirable features, but in many cases they are not – I’m not sure if this is something that could be adapted to general task management or not, but so far I’ve found it to be very easy to use. It doesn’t take many cognitive cycles to gauge your progress, which is the greatest immediate reward I’ve found for a task manager, and adding tasks is only a problem if you feel strongly about the location.

It is also trivial to add comments to individual or multiple tasks, or just as a sticky-note, just make them yellow :)