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The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

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Sunday, October 14, 2012

Google Tasks

I want to like Google tasks, really I do.

But, try as I might, I can't bring myself to like them.  Or use them regularly.  They are just so limited wrt other task management systems.

Here, I will take notes.  Although I may just as often start a new blog tem.

9 comments:

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Google Tasks understands subtasks. Yay!

Although it does not understand that a task may be a subtask to more than one task. Which is not quite the same as task dependencies.

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Google Tasks can appear in Google Calendar. Yay!

But they appear as points in time. What I want is for tasks to keep reappearing in the task list, every day until completed, or deferred.

(For that matter, I want tasks that recur - sometimes at a fixed schedule, e.g. once a week, sometimes after a time delay - e.g. I can't go back to get my allergy shots once a week if I slipped an appointment, there must be N days of separation.)

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

GTasks has subtasks. Yay!

But AFAIK there is no way to collapse a task's subtask tree.

Also: for subtasks I typically only want to see the next steps, the next actions in the GTD sense. Not all the subtasks, just the ones that I need to work on next. AFAIK no way to do that in GT.

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Google Tasks cannot operate offline on my Android mobile, AFAIK. That makes it much less useful in Oregon near the coast and mountains.

Offlineability is one of those utility aspects that I want to be ubiquitous.

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Can't seem to change list a task belongs to in the mobile friendly tasks XHTML.

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

If you create subtasks, you can mark all subtasks done by clicking on the parent task. Yay!

Boo!@: but if you click by accidenbt, and then unclick, the completion stats of all of the subtasks is erased. Hiss!

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

I would luike to record the history - when a task was create, when it was marked complete. etc.

Editing, versioning, is another of those things that I want to be ubiquitous utilities.

Except for the GUI, on Android and PC. Google Tasks is less useful, less reliable, than a text file.

If Google Drive could handle text file conflicts, that would be the way to go. (deally with an Android App interface to such a text file.)

Bryan Buckley said...

you are using canvas view right?

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Thanks Bryan. I wasn't using Google Tasks Canvas view. I am now.

It makes things better, but many of my comments still apply. E.g. I still want tasks to appear in more than one list, and/or have labels/categories on tasks.


Anyway.... why is the canvas view not linked to from any of the other views? Basically because Google's second tier stuff like tasks grows, but seems not to have an overall design.


Seems to me that Google is missing an opportunity by not pushing tasks. If I put "buy PC for my daughter for Xmas" on a task list, it seems to me that that is a great opportunity for advertising. Assuming privacy issues handled.

Similarly, if I put "buy yogurt" on my shopping list... I have elsewhere discussed why tasks and to-do lists and checklists have a lot in common, mainly differing in default UI and heavy-weightness.



BTW, thanks, this is why I do this stream of consciousnes blog. Occasionally I get help.
Thanks again, BB.