Author: ryan
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An update to managing my tasks in plaintext using the Taskpaper format
I’ve talked about my set up for lists a couple of times, but it’s been awhile so I believe it is time for an update. For those that don’t remember, I keep my to do lists in plain text files and store them in a Dropbox folder. I use a specific format for these to do files called taskpaper.
Taskpaper format primer
The taskpaper format is pretty simple. Tasks are lines that start with a hyphen:
- task 1 - task 2 - task 3
Tasks can be organized by projects. A project is a line of text that ends with a colon:
Project 1: - task 1 - task 2 - task 3
Finally, context can be added to an item by prefixing the context with the ampersand:
Project 1: - task 1 @due(2018-12-25) @home - task 2 @phone - task 3 @errands
My to do files
I have two main to do files: daily.taskpaper and today.taskpaper. The daily.taskpaper has a list of tasks that need to be completed every day or almost every day. This list gets reset every morning. The today.taskpaper file is my main list of tasks that need to be completed at some time.
In addition to these two files, I also keep a workdaily.taskpaper and worktoday.taskpaper. These two files have the same functions as the previous two, except them are for work.
Software used
To manage my to do lists I use 3 pieces of software: Drafts for iOS & Editorial on my iPhone and vim on my various desktops and laptops.
Drafts for iOS (Drafts 5 is $20 a year, Drafts 4 is $5)
It’s hard to explain what Drafts is. On a first look, you may say it’s a notes app, but it does far more than just take notes. Drafts is my first stop for data entry. What Drafts does is allow you to put together workflows that can manipulate your text in various ways. I have an action that takes whatever I entered and prepends that information to the designated taskpaper file. This is what I use to quickly enter tasks on the fly.
Unfortunately, Drafts 5 is now a $20 year subscription. I haven’t upgraded from Drafts 4 yet, with me having a tough time justifying $20 a year. Drafts 4 Legacy is still available, although I believe I could write a shortcut in the Shortcuts app to add items to my to do list.
Editorial ($5)
Editorialis a programmable text processor that just so happens to have a taskpaper mode. When a .taskpaper file is opened, each task as a check box and you can drag and drop tasks to move them. There are two workflows that I have added to Editorial for use with taskpaper files. One archives @done tasks and puts them at the bottom of the file. The other lets me focus on tasks with a particular tag, such as @today.
A free text editor for iOS is Pretext. It won’t be as easy as Editorial, but it will work.
VIM for the win!
This solution won’t work for most people, but it works for me. VIM is a command line text editor that can be extended with various scripts. If you want to use a mouse, then the Atom Editor along with the Tasks plugin works pretty well.
For VIM I have two addons installed, vim-taskpaper and Autosave. Vim-taskpaper adds several keyboard commands to make it easy to complete and archive tasks. The Autosave addon saves the .taskpaper file automatically after changes. Since I use several different machines, there are times when I forget to save and quit, which means I could lose information.
In practice
I start my day be resetting my two daily lists, and work my way through completing the tasks that need to be done each day.
In the today.taskpaper file I will go through and mark items to work on that day with @today. I’ll also check any @due dates to see what is coming up or what is due and mark them with @today so I can get them completed.
I follow the Getting Things Done philosophy in my lists, using the projects in my today.taskpaper as contexts. This means I have the following projects in my today.taskpaper file: Errands, Computer, Home, Phone, and Someday.
Under the projects I have the tasks to be completed in each context.
Errands: - Pick up Ho Hos @today Phone: - Call Hostess and tell them how awesome Ho Hos are Computer: - Tweet about Ho Hos - Write a blog post about the wonders of Ho Hos
You don’t need special software to manage your lists, you only need something that can read & write plain text files.
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I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 5th time in 2018.
I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 5th time in 2018.
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I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 4th time in 2018.
I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 4th time in 2018.
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Tempest and Galaga save the high score on the 1Up cabinets
Even if the machine is powered off. I didn’t try unplugging them.
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Using the Shortcuts app to keep track of my Christmas Vacation viewings
As some of you know, I watch a lot of Christmas Vacation during the holidays. I watch it so many times that I feel it is my duty to inform the world that not only have I watched Christmas Vacation, but also how many times I’ve watched it.At first, I used a simple tally sheet in the form of a note on my phone, but that was too much work. I have this powerful phone, it should do the work for me! My first attempt at automation used a combination of Pythonista and Dropbox. It worked, but wasn’t elegant. And I’m all about the elegance.
Two years ago, I bought the Workflow app for iOS. With Workflow, I was able to write a small set of instructions that kept track of how many viewings I have completed. The Workflow had the added capability of creating my status message so I didn’t have to. All of this was under a simple tap of an icon on my home screen.
Workflow was purchased by Apple, and is now a part of iOS 12 and called Shortcuts. You can use it to automate all sorts of task, but today my goal is to keep track of how many times I’ve watched Christmas Vacation.
Show me the Shortcut
Whoa, slow down there cowboy, at least buy me dinner first. If you don’t want to wait and learn the nitty gritty, then go grab the Shortcut from any iOS device running iOS 12.
Creating a shortcut
Counting up
There is one piece of information that I need to store somewhere, the number of viewings. Shortcuts doesn’t have anyway of storing this information in itself, so I settled on iCloud Drive. Shortcuts already has a folder in iCloud Drive called, are you ready for this, Shortcuts. In that folder I store a text file named cv.txtĀ whose contents are the number of viewings of Christmas Vacation.
The first few steps of the Shortcut check and see if the file exists. If it doesn’t, a file named cv.txt will be created in /Shortcuts with the contents of 0. If the file exists, the Shortcut sets a variable to the number of viewings, incrementing it by 1. Since the Shortcut creates the file if it isn’t there, to reset the number of viewings each year I only need to delete the current cv.txtĀ file.
We now have a number of viewings, let’s add one to it.
And convert it to a dictionary for the next step.
Ordinal steps
I want to share out the phrase “I’ve watched Christmas Vacation for the 5th time in 2018“, replacing the number of viewings with the ordinal number. Yes, ordinal is the correct word, go look it up. The easiest way to get the ordinal was to set up a dictionary of values, where 1 equals 1st, 2 equals 2nd, 3 equals 3rd, and so on, up to 25. The Shortcut looks up the value based on count.
The above creates a dictionary, and sets the variable Ordinal to the looked up value based on Count. The dictionary is for Javascript, so the format isĀ { “1”:”1st”, “2”:”2nd”, “3”:”3rd” }.
Verification
Once we have the ordinal, the Shortcut asks for verification to increment the number of viewings and post it. If they cancel at this step, no harm no foul, the Shortcut ends.
Selecting Post will save the current number of views to cv.txt in iCloud Drive, overwriting the current file.
Posting
Finally, the time has come to compose the status message and share it.
The Text block composes the message, using the variable Ordinal and the special variable Current Date. Current Date is a custom format of yyyy, which will be the current year. This way I don’t have to update the Shortcut every year.Now that we have our message, I’ll use the standard Share sheet to share it to the world.
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I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 3rd time in 2018.
I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 3rd time in 2018.
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Goz reviews The Grinch
For the first time since July I finally made it to the movies, andĀ The Grinch is a lot different fromĀ Skyscraper. One has The Rock, while the other has Benedict Cumberbatch.
The Grinch channeling his inner Roz. The Grinch, which also stars two American treasures, Keenan Thompson and Rashida Jones, is a cute, short (86 minutes) movie with no new surprises. If you’ve seen the TV special, there won’t be anything new here. I mean, I wasn’t expecting to find out that the Grinch was Cindy Lou Who’s father, but it would have been interesting to see something new that we haven’t seen before. And I want some explanation on why the Grinch is the only one in town who is green.
Anyone under the age of 9 will love the movie, anyone older? It’s hit or miss. The Grinch’s gadgets were awesome, they were some of the best scenes for me. The animation was also gorgeous, although the heavy use of soft focus made some scenes hard to watch. You were constantly battling what the director wanted you to see and what you wanted to see.
All in all, I give the movie 5 out of 6.5 stars.
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I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 2nd time in 2018.
I’m watching Christmas Vacation for the 2nd time in 2018.
