TeamTasks: Managing Tasks the TiddlyWiki Way

Productivity Sauce

TeamTasks is not your usual task manager. Based on TiddlyWiki, TeamTasks consists of a single self-contained HTML file, so there is nothing to install, and you can run the application on any machine as long as it has a Web browser.

Unlike traditional task managers, TeamTasks stores all the settings and data in tiddlers -- small editable containers. TeamTasks settings are saved in so-called definition tiddlers which you can access via the Customise menu in the sidebar. For starters, you have to define at least one user, which is done by adding the desired user name to the UserDefinition tiddler. To make it easier to manage tasks, you should also define so-called scopes. You can think of scopes as projects, or contexts if you prefer the GTD terminology. Similar to users, scopes are defined in the special ScopeDefinitions tiddler. If necessary, you can change the default task priorities and status entries in the PriorityDefinitions and StatusDefinitions tiddlers. Once you've configured TeamTasks, you can start populating it with tasks using the New Task button. Each task has four drop-down lists which let you to specify the task's scope, priority, user, and status. To quickly find tasks, you can use the Search field in the sidebar, but TeamTasks also sports handy reporting capabilities. In addition to the DefaultReportView report in the Task views menu in the sidebar, you can create custom task views by creating a new tiddler with a few lines of embedded code. For example, the code below generates a report displaying the priority, status, and user for each task:

<<TTReportView DisplayFields:"Title,Priority,Status,User">>

You can also order the tasks in a view using the OrderBy option:

<<TTReportView DisplayFields:"Title,Priority,Status" OrderBy:"Status,asc">>

And you can display a list of tasks that match specified criteria. For example, the following code displays a list of tasks with high priority:

<<TTReportView DisplayFields:"Title,Priority,Status" OrderBy:"Status,asc" Priority:"high">>

To add the created task view to the Task views menu, open the tiddler called TaskViews (you can locate it using the Listings menu in the sidebar) and add the created view to the list of tiddlers.