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TeMPOraLHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

And if I'm doing my semi-regular project management rant once again (a subset of more general …

… And if I'm doing my semi-regular project management rant once again (a subset of more general ranting that, on Mastodon, I started to tag as #ItsAGraph, #NotATree), let me pile on some extra wishlist items: counterfactual modelling, conditionals, probabilities. That is, expressing the idea that there are alternative strategies to pursue, and which one to take depends on information available only partway through the project.

Original discussionVikunja – The open-source, self-hostable to-do app90 source comments · at import
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darkteflonHN

I’ve been a paying Todoist customer for many years. For some reason, they steadfastly refuse to introduce blocking/blocked by flags. It seems so strange to me to do all the hard work of allowing arbitrarily nested projects and tasks, sub-tasks, labels, complex filters and collaboration, but then not do dependencies. Imo dependencies is the big difference between something you can use on complex projects, and a “mere” to-do list - even one with nested projects, labels, filters, whatever. I thought that perhaps I wanted a Gantt chart tool and spent a couple of months going down that route. At least in my experience, though, what I actually wanted was just some way to establish a DAG - I didn’t even necessarily need a way to visualise it, just the ability to group and filter on it. Vikunja looks interesting - open source, self-hosted and supports dependencies/relations. No iOS mobile client…

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solarkraftHN

> I started to tag as #ItsAGraph, #NotATree Oh, epic! While I do agree that most things that are modeled as yes are conceptually actually graphs, maybe my standards are lower/I just use worse software - I'd be very happy to get more trees. My typical rant topic is "just give me a damn tree". The worst offenders regarding this I can think of are note apps with their weird "notebook", "chapter","page" concepts rather than just letting me choose the depth of nesting I need.

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michaelsalimHN

I made Recall[0] which is all about this. Managing tasks using a tree structure (like folder/files, no level limit). And dependency representation with DAG graphs. Give it a try, you might like it. Unfortunately the project is currently paused since i can't figure out how to make it work financially (you can still use it though). The space is really crowded and most people don't really think about dependencies, so it's quite a hard sell. I might open-source the project and continue with it in the near future but I'll need some validation that the tool is useful before I commit to that. So if you do like it, I'd love to have a chat :) [0] https://recalllab.com

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thijserHN

Have you tried Trilium ( https://github.com/zadam/trilium )? It's a generic note storage (with a DAG based model) that's very extensible and comes with a demo task manager implementation: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Task-manager

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lonelyasacloudHN

> This. To me, it seems like a weird market blind spot. Most of the tools in this space can't even do a proper tree - typically they limit you to 2-4 levels, like "project", "task", "subtask" and "checklist". The few that don't, stick to the tree model, even though work naturally structures itself into a DAG. I did wonder that myself. But having tried implementing, I'd wager that deep many-to-many parent-child relationships are not directly visible more often is because no one has figured out good paradigms [1] to surface the functionality in a way that users would want to use most of the time (witness MS Project) versus the alternative tags, saved search, etc approaches. [1] It's a fairly chunky challenge. Consider for example, what happens, and how is it presented to the user during the simple operation of removing an item. What happens when it has multiple parents? What about if it al…

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