frequent-task-reminder 0.2.1
Scenario description
Every day you have to do repetitive tasks. Maybe you are keeping an eye on some mirror. Maybe you check some web forum for specific posts. Maybe you are working on a book or essay and try to make progress on it every day. Maybe you prefer the computer to remind you of some task you otherwise manage to ignore. This program will remind you of those boring tasks. Every day. In fact, every time you run it.
Ouch, that's not what I'm looking for
That's a shame. Maybe you are looking for task/todo tracking software with a focus on something else? In that case, stop reading this and head to http://freshmeat.net/. If you search for the word task you will find many projects. Some of them may be of use to you.
Performing this little search I found the program http://freshmeat.net/projects/ntodo/. The main difference is that it is a GUI only program and it doesn't seem to work for repeated tasks, so you would have to create the same daily tasks every day.
It's mainly for that reason that I wrote this program, most task tracking software is focused on one time tasks which are not to be repeated. Anyway, judge yourself, and never stop looking for the perfect piece of software!
How does it work?
frequent-task-reminder keeps a little database of pending tasks in a file located at ``~/.frequent-task-reminderrc``. On the first run, it will be created with pretty much a simple XML container. First you have to add pending tasks you want this program to remind you. Then, you call this script for example from your ``~/.bash_profile``, so it is called every time you log into a console or open an xterm. Of course, add the parameter ``--list`` to actually show the list of tasks. And whenever you feel like, clear a pending work unit.
It's all very easy, and running the script without parameters or with the ``--help`` parameter will show you the commandline usage instructions. Right now the program is limited to remind you of tasks once per day. This is, every day the program adds a pending work unit to all active tasks, which you have to clear. Since running the script with the ``--critical`` option only shows the tasks without cleared work units, this will show you what you still have to do before the day is over.
Software requisites
This software requires Python (http://www.python.org). It is known to work with version 2.3.3. I haven't bothered too much to make it work with previous versions, but if you need this, I can make an efort and make it work with 1.5.2 or something like that. You also need the ElementTree XML Python package from http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm.
Usage examples
frequent-task-reminder is for the time being a command line tool with a few options. Run it with the ``-h`` or ``-help`` arguments and it will tell you anything you need to know.
Usually you will end up putting this line somewhere in your ~/.bash_profile::
path/to/where/you/untarred/this/frequent-task-reminder.py -lc
The first thing you will want to do is create a new task::
frequent-task-reminder.py -a "Visit http://photo.net/"
The task is created, and the program automatically lists all the active tasks. Your new task will have an numerid id, which can be used later to handle work units. Now, assuming you have done the task for today, you want to clear the work unit with::
frequent-task-reminder.py -w task_id/task_name
You can use the name of the task or the id, which is shorter and quicker to type. Once the task is cleared to zero, just wait another day and the counter will go up.
If you are wondering what kind of tasks this is good for, I do some documentation cleanup tasks for a few free software projects. It is as easy as taking the entry of a programming API and thinking how would you improve the documentation. So each day I try to improve the API and at the end of the week I see if I can send a patch to the project with my changes.
Another one I do every day is documentation translation. The problem with translations is that it's a very very very boring job. About 95% of people I've seen strarting a translation are gone after a week. However, translating one or two paragraphs of text a day takes less than five minutes. So that's all I do. At the end of the month, I do more this way than saying "Ah, I'll wait for a weekend and work for an hour or two", because I know (and you know) that weekends are for other things and I'll want to rest.
Finally, another nice use I have for this program is reminding me to read books. Depending on the book, my interest and free time, I decide that one work unit is a few pages or a chapter. This way I have been reading up to five books simultaneously and none of them really drag me down. In fact, all the above takes about less than half hour every day. I prefer to spend that time in various projects than neglect something for a long time. If you think this way too, you might find the program useful.
Downloads and contact information
The web page for this script is at:
Releases can be downloaded from:
http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4008
BerliOS also provides other services related to this project at:
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/ftr/
You should be able to email me using gradha@users.berlios.de, which is a forwarder to my real email address.
The future
At the moment this is just text UI. GUI interfaces should come sooner or later. If you want to, take a look at the TODO.txt file that comes with the package, that's what I'm planning to fix.
License
This software is covered under the GPL_. See the full license text in the provided LICENSE.txt file.
.. _GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL