Task Management: Not Good Enough

What I really want is a Grammarly-inspired Chrome plugin to manage tasks anytime I’m typing

Stowe Boyd
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

After decades of using dozens of different systems to manage work — team task lists, shared collaborative documents, work chat, and so on — I am dissatisfied with the offerings and puzzled by the lack of innovation in the field.

Task management offers a seemingly endless array of products, but they seem to fall into a narrow range of alternatives:

  • Lists of Tasks — Products like Asana, Todoist, and Quire are based at their foundation on lists of tasks. Yes, they offer various ways to aggregate and visualize the tasks — by projects, tags, assignment, organizations, due dates — but at core they are only a few steps up from a spreadsheet of to do items.
  • Kanban Boards — Trello and a long list of other tools are organized around ‘boards’ — typically vertical regions representing phases of a project — on which ‘cards’ are ordered. Cards are generally lists of tasks, so Kanban boards turn out to be just another take on Lists of Tasks.
  • ‘Work Processing’ — Quip, Dropbox Paper, Box Notes, and a shortlist of other start-ups start with the shared collaborative document model a la Google Docs, and add task lists (‘checklists’). I call this ‘work processing’ to follow the idea of ‘word processing’. This is quite different from Lists of Tasks and Kanban Boards since the collaborative document approach treats tasks as just another sort of document element, like tables, images, numbered lists, and so on. The biggest shortfall with these tools is that there is no way to generate a list of all tasks across a collection of docs.
  • Calendaring — There are a few products like Sunsama and NotePlan that are based on calendars with the addition of tasks, but this is an underutilized area, perhaps because people are already using existing taskless calendars and they are sticky.

One issue that transcends all these tools: what if I need or want to use more than one app to create tasks? Also, l use tools that aren’t task management tools per se, like email or comments on Slack, but in which I could type ’- [ ] don’t forget to do that thing 2017–09–09’. (Note: ‘- []’ is markdown for a checklist item.)

Imagine a Grammarly-like tool which instead of checking the syntax of the text I am messing with is looking over my shoulder for task-like things in the text I type. When it sees one, the app could a/ reformat it to be consistent, b/ capture the content, and c/ take note of where it was created, as in some Slack channel, or a Google Doc, in an email, or a comment on a friend’s blog. There would be a way to look at all my consolidated tasks, see their origins, and to edit their state, like checking them off or changing a due date. The tool would attempt to open the original context and to amend the original, if possible, with me looking on. Like Grammarly, this could be built as a Chrome plugin.

I’d be willing to work with anyone interested in building this.

Originally published at stoweboyd.com.

GigaOm

GigaOm is the leading global voice on emerging technologies. We help transform enterprises with insight and guidance in an AI-enriched, data-driven world.

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Stowe Boyd

Written by

Founder, Work Futures. Editor, GigaOm. My obsession is the ecology of work, and the anthropology of the future.

GigaOm

GigaOm

GigaOm is the leading global voice on emerging technologies. We help transform enterprises with insight and guidance in an AI-enriched, data-driven world.

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