TaskPaper 3
Is time management taking too much of your time?
$24.99 Developer Hog Bay Software, taskpaper.com Requirements OS X 10.10 or later If you’ve used apps as part of a time/task management system such as Getting Things Done (GTD) you’ll know that you can spend so much time creating the perfect system and formatting everything that you don’t actually Get Things Done at all. If that sounds familiar, TaskPaper 3 may be the app for you.
TaskPaper is designed for speed, and as a result it’s very simple: it uses plain text files and simple syntax to automatically format your projects, tasks
and notes. That simplicity means that learning TaskPaper is easy. You create a new document and then add a project to it by typing a project title and then finishing with a colon; the first item underneath is automatically indented and you can indent further with the † key. Tasks are prefixed with a dash and a space, tags are added by prefixing them with an @ symbol, and notes aren’t prefixed with anything at all.
Putting information into TaskPaper may be simple, but that information is organized very intelligently. In addition to the (collapsible) sidebar listing everything, red dots automatically appear next to projects and tasks in the main window; clicking the dots expands and collapses them for effortless navigation. You can theme the interface using CSS/LESS formatting if you want, and the app has its own scripting system for automation and integration with other programs. Where things get really interesting is when you combine tags with searching. Search for “@maclife not @done” finds unfinished items with the appropriate tag, and you can save searches – so, for example, you might create an item called “Panic!” using the expression “Panic@search(@monday and not @done)” to see how you’ll be spending your weekend. The search system is very powerful, especially if you give some thought to your tags and tag absolutely everything.
It’s great stuff, but there are a few caveats to mention. Existing users with AppleScripts on TaskPaper 2 won’t be able to bring those across - it’s all about JavaScript now - and the move to LESS/CSS means XML layouts have gone too. There’s no mobile app, either, although as plain text is the world’s most widely supported format you can simply stick your files in an iCloud Drive folder and use pretty much any app to edit them.
the bottom line. TaskPaper may look simple, but it’s scriptable and boasts a superb search system. It’s a very effective project outliner. Gary Marshall