I've been working for myself for almost two weeks now just trying to lay down some bases and modify some of the logos I got back from freelancers to make it look pleasant. Design and infrastructure have been my focus and that will come to a head soon. I have down a good version 1 layout of Take to Task (yes that's the name), which is only for myself.
I put up a landing page here: http://www.take2task.com (Edit 11/22/2019 I have a much better name for this) that displays the logo and logotype under the moniker of "Excerion Sun" (abbreviated to ExcSn). This app uses Svelte/Sapper and is a self contained node application, aka a binary. The font uses Inter font, which I think is a really nice general legible font. I like it so much that I will switch this blog to that font some day.
It has been nice just laying the ground down for the real development.
Why task management?
Isn't Trello good enough or Monday.com?
These are really good products with many loyal users and plenty of alternatives exist across many product categories which leads me
to believe loyalty will always shift towards a product that jives with
consumers. I will not strive to create a "better" product (that would
take too long), but instead create a product that jives with me. It has
to be able to support all of my use cases for task management which is why version 1 and version 2 are solely private.
Another reason is observing people at work using things like JIRA, Trello, Asana, etc. Why so many kinds of apps to keep track of your task state? This is something you could do with post it notes. With post it notes I can remember to throw it in the trash, but managing tasks on different applications leaves me wanting to throw them out.
Last, I feel that there are features missing in current task management products and I've written some down and hope to find more and deliver it so I can use and refine them.
Trello
I use Trello for personal and work because it is so simple. Just open a board, add a task and viola there it is. There is always that feeling that something is missing and wondered "if Trello had this" then it could be better. I love it. Probably one of the single best software created for productivity other than OneNote
Templating is something I desired and Trello just recently added it. Problem is that Monday.com and others have had this for quite a while, so I question if Trello is a focus for Atlassian? Hell I used to keep tasks in OneNote and would create a Template Page just so I could have something to start from so templates are a brain dead feature.
Automation is kind of handled by power-ups, but I don't use power ups. Why don't I use power-ups? because I associate it with being a paid feature, so I don't even bother to look. When I did look, I saw some gimmicky things that made me question what the hell power ups are. If there are serious power ups that I can use for typical use cases then Trello needs to do better marketing of those.
You can only have one kind of view on your tasks. I've seen this at work where one would create a board to track tasks by users then those users would create boards by the product area they are targeting. Ideally everyone wants to be be on one page with some filters (kind of like JIRA). Trello has some search and filtering capabilities, but it does not change the view! How can I make it such that an executive or manager can look at my Trello board and get an idea when something is going to be delivered?! Right, I would have to do it manually or just take my word for it.
You may wonder why I talk about Trello the most and that is because it is so simple. I looked at several task management software such as Monday.com, Clickup.com and etc. and have little experience with them, but using the products a little and getting in to the flow quickly is what I require.