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GTD Weekly review helper (Look, I made a thing!) (self.taskwarrior)

submitted by abesto

I've been using Taskwarrior to implement GTD for a few months now, and managed to build a script that helps me do my weekly review more smoothly. Thought I'd share: https://github.com/abesto/gtd

The steps it implements:

  • Reminder to do a mini mind sweep, making sure there are no free-floating things
  • Project review, where it dumps the pending tasks of each project one by one, and prompts to make any updates (record new tasks, mark tasks done, etc) in another shell
  • +next review, where it prompts me to select exactly one +next task for projects that have not exactly one +next task (this is a personal preference)
  • Reminder to process e-mail, turn into Taskwarrior items as appropriate in another shell
  • Reminder to check last two weeks and next two weeks in calendars, turn into Taskwarrior items as appropriate in another shell
  • Dumps my +someday tasks for review
  • Dumps my +in tasks, bugs me until they're all gone (by processing them in another shell)
  • Runs task sync

The script is written in a way that makes it easy to disable individual steps / change their order, and somewhat easy to modify the steps themselves.

Asciinema recording with lorem-ipsum-ized strings: ![asciicast](https://asciinema.org/a/joY4R0pPLKVGxlhdMwgbVAHqc.png)

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[–]megaduks 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This is awsome, thank you!

[–]abesto[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Glad you found it useful :)

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[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

This looks really cool, but how exactly does this differ from tasksh?

[–]abesto[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm confused. tasksh is an interactive shell for Taskwarrior. This is a script automating a very specific GTD workflow. They're in a different category entirely. Maybe you mean tasksh review? That implements a completely different workflow.

Again, I'm confused, if this is not an answer then please elaborate.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

tasksh is a shell. review is a command in the shell. It is very clearly a GTD review, which makes sense since Taskwarrior is a GTD app that despite being flexible is clearly still GTD oriented in almost everything it can do. My question was how exactly your script's reviewing process differs fundamentally from it. It seems like a heavy handed way of doing the same thing, unless I'm misunderstanding.

[–]abesto[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Alright, now I understand where you're coming from. My understanding of the review command: it goes through all the existing tasks, and asks whether / how they need updating. That to me is a more general "review" in a more general TODO list setup. The weekly GTD review has a number of distinct steps - the very steps implemented in this script.

You could argue that looking at each task, and asking if it's done or not, or if it needs to be updated, solves a number of the steps in one go. Two problems with that. One: it doesn't ask you to capture any loose things in your head into your inbox. Two: it's actually really important to do the steps of the review distinctly, to limit the scope of things you need to think about at each step. It's the difference between "make it awesome" and a well-formed project specification.

Bottom line: the tasksh review command is not a GTD weekly review. This is.

(I realize I'm replying to a deleted account, but maybe this is useful to someone else as well)

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This is cool. Would you be willing to make a youtube guide or something like that going through how to make this from scratch? I am interested in making my own and learning from the experience as well.

[–]abesto[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's an interesting idea, but I'm afraid I don't have the bandwidth to take on that. I'd recommend looking at the commit history to get some idea of the development process. The basic flow was:

  • Figure out next one thing I wanted the script to do
  • Figure out how to do that with Taskwarrior (what invocation of task will achieve what I need)
  • Implement it into the script
  • Make the input / output nicer
  • Refactor
  • Repeat

Good luck!