output of my custom task top
report
It happened again. I have a couple dozen great ideas for the blog. Loads of other things I need to get at as well. So yeah. I got myself a little overwhelmed, and I need to stop and get a solid idea of the top tasks: the ones I want to be working on now or soon.
I’ve been dutifully adding everything to Taskwarrior, assigning priorities as I go.
In case you forgot, or haven’t been following from the beginning, I use Taskwarrior’s Priority
field to show how soon I want to work on a task. Priority:M
? I want to work on it soon. Priority:H
? Either I am working on it right now or I really want to be.
[!NOTE] Yeah I know Taskwarrior lets you assign due dates and dependencies. Tasks that are due or that block something else get higher
Urgency
, and bubble to the top of reports. For some folks, that works great.For me? They mostly lead to heartbreak and self-recrimination. I refer you to these words of wisdom from a greater mind:
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
— Douglas Adams
I get more done quicker by flagging a few tasks as important, a few more tasks as less important, and the rest as “whatever.”
I still use [[active-tasks-in-taskwarrior|
start
]] to remember what I’m doing right now though. I’m not completely weird.
Time for me to figure out or
in Taskwarrior.
Filtering with or
Filters already have an implied and
. It looks like this.
How many active tasks do I have?
How many active tasks do I want to work on soon?
That’s filtering tasks to those for which +PENDING
and priority:M
are true.
How many active tasks do I want to be working on now?
That’s a bit much. It should be more like four or five.
How many active tasks do I want to work on now or soon? That is, which tasks are +PENDING
and have either priority:M
or priority:H
?
We can use or
to join two filters. If either of them is true for the task, that task is included. Use parentheses to build more complex filters.
Tada — oops. Hang on. This stuff goes through the shell before it reaches Taskwarrior. Let’s put the filter in a string.
Tada!
Okay, it works, but I just know there will be more typos using this filter from memory. How can I avoid typing it in every time?
Use a context
I could add that priority filter to my “focused” context, used when I need to ignore distracting ideas.
~/.taskrc
Now every report skips low priority tasks.
This is great, but I want to know my top tasks even when I’m not in focused context.
Plus it’s easy to forget which context you’re in. I once spent 15 minutes trying to find a +work
task before remembering I was still in offwork
context. Which reminds me —
Use a shell alias
Part of Taskwarrior’s charm is the fact that we use task
from the command line. I could take advantage of that with a shell alias for task
using the preface filter.
~/.aliases
This gives me sort of an on-the-fly context.
I could use ttop
with any Taskwarrior command, so ttop next
would be a fine way to look at my important tasks.
But I’d kind of like to have a custom report for reviewing tasks I’ve set as important. Something with a little more information than task minimal
but a bit less than task next
.
Use a custom report
Might be easier to show than tell. For more of a “tell” approach, check the “REPORTS” section of man taskrc
. Here’s my custom “top” report, loosely based on Taskwarrior’s minimal
report.
~/.taskrc
-
description.count
column is used for the description text and the number of annotations for the task. -
sort
specifies columns to sort by, in descending or ascending order.priority-/
means “descending, dividing each block of priorities with a blank row.”
And here’s what my top
report looks like.
I can apply additional filters just like with any other report.
So that’s pretty handy. But clearly I need to clean this up a bit. Some of those aren’t really things I want to work on soon. But at least now I have one less priority:H
task.
You can see Taskwarrior’s settings for the minimal
report, or any other, with show report.NAME
:
Backlinks
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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-18