Notes and Tasks

The philosophy behind this new version of Nottingham is that I've been keeping track of tasks for me and my coworkers as well as meeting notes in my, well, notes. I do this using my own special syntax for note taking. And I decided to rebuild Nottingham from a pure note taking app into a hybrid notes and task management app that lets you move between the two modes of work:

• Looking at your notes
• Working on the tasks contained in those notes

When you select a folder in the Library, you can switch to Tasks mode using the picker at the top of the window.

Nottingham will parse all of the notes in that folder for tasks and then let you sort, filter, and work with them in a dedicated task view.

While the task viewer is (for now) primarily meant for viewing your tasks and the note interface for editing them, you can do some basic edits on your tasks. For example, marking a task as complete or incomplete will update the underlying note on disk for your. In future releases, I plan on allowing editing of a task's due date, defer date, tags, etc.

Here's a quick video demonstrating how tasks can be filtered by status, by date, and the person they're assigned to.

For now, tasks are parsed using my own, odd shorthand for taking notes. Nottingham will eventually support more mainstream plain-text task syntaxes like Taskpaper and/or todo.txt.

But, for now, you can play with tasks using my own syntax.

Every task in your note lives on a separete line of tetx and must be assigned to someone (including yourself). Otherwise, that line in your note is ignored. To assign a task to someone, just write @name. For example:

This is a task that @tyler is assigned to

You can mark a task complete by beginning the line with an x or by including xxx anywhere on the line.

x This task for @liz has been completed
Another task for @harper is finished xxx
@tyler is lazy and still hasn't finished this one

A task can include tags using #tag #names.

Buy milk #errand
@tyler to call Mike #vacation

You can signify that a task is dropped or no longer being worked on by inserting --- anywhere on the line.

@tyler --- Write the great American novel

(Think of that syntax as striking-thru a line of text on paper.)

If a task includes a date formated like YYYY-MM-DD, that will be used as a due date.

If a task includes a date formated like +YYYY-MM-DD (with a + in front of the date), that will be used as a defer date.

Priority can be assigned to tasks with a ! character followed by a single letter or number such as !1 or !a. Currently, Nottingham places no empahsis or meaning on the letters or numbers you use. That's up to you to decide.

A task can be flagged with !#. (That's an exclamation mark followed by a single hash character.)

I have other syntax options avaiable for doing advanced things like recording time spent on a task and the estimated time to complete. Even assigned locations / geofences. But these features are in-flux and on-hold while I decide on how to support them alongside TaskPaper and/or todo.txt syntax.