DEV Community

Discussion on: The Power of the TODO List

Collapse
 
mistermantas profile image
Mantas

Really?

TODO.txt?

Isn’t something like GitHub Issues supposed to make that kind of stuff a thing of the past, no? Because I think I can accomplish everything of TODO.txt in an issue tracker. Heck, GitHub even has a Trello project… thing that can also help you do everything mentioned.

Collapse
 
jlhcoder profile image
James Hood

Don't get stuck on the medium. The underlying principles are the more important part: breaking tasks down, prioritizing, detecting when you're overloaded and quick retrieval of history of accomplishments. Most importantly, finding a minimal overhead way to consistently maintain these things every single day. Use whatever medium that allows you to do that.

But since you went there...as a unix CLI power user, you will never show me an issue tracker interface that matches the speed and flexibility of plain text files + unix command line tools. There's also no internet connection required. Downside is you have to manage your own backup solution, but it's really easy to setup a private git repo and a daily cron job that auto commits and pushes your updates to a remote repo.

Tools like issue trackers and Trello are great as soon as the number of users is greater than 1. However for the individual case, the overhead of using those tools is always greater than plain text.

Good example of why it's important to check your requirements before choosing (or prematurely rejecting) certain tools...