Everyone conceptualizes getting things done (both personal and work) in different ways. It's innate in us to want to "improve" that process.
Personally, I've tried:
- Notes app
- A litany of "purpose built" task management software solutions (too many to individually name here)
- Back of my hand with pen
- Physical sticky notes
- Timed reminders
- Reminders without times
- Time without reminders
- Calendar blocking
- Front of my hand with pen
and I'm sure there are others that I've forgotten, but chasing the "this will finally solve my organization issues" dragon is both exhausting and probably not the right way to go about it in the first place.
Mostly because not every task requires the same process to solve it. Better yet, how does one even classify tasks vs to-dos? Is a to-do actually a subtask toward a larger task? Is a task a subtask to a project?
While I'd love to debate task naming and hierarchy (which I actually would really like to do), I'm more focused today on visualizing what I think is the most common pattern that I run into personally on a day to day basis: I have a task I need to accomplish and I know the pieces (or subtasks) involved to complete that task.
I'm a visual person. Colors, shapes, colored shapes, etc. For understanding progress on tasks, it's no different. I like to see where I'm at, what's left, and on top of it all, I want it to feel satisfying when I progress through the task.
Basecamp has a hill view that projects use to determine where in the project specific items are and understanding if there are tasks that still need "figuring out" or if they're actively being "executed". When I saw this layout, I thought the base concept made sense, but I'd actually argue the hill design makes more sense when you actually know each of the pieces and it's more of the metaphorical progressing through each of them to feel the momentum of completion.
In short, I made a video that displays that concept through an unreleased iOS app aptly named Inchworm (because hill tasks were already a thing and inchworms weren't used in task management yet). You can watch it below.
A few technical things (and the main reason why it's unavailable):
I built it using React Native (via Expo) and mainly styled in-line. I started with React Native Skia, but hadn't really used the library before, so stuck with animating the "worm" progress bar with plain SVGs instead.
All of the basics were pretty simple, but what really caught me up was using react-spring/native instead of the tried and trusted reanimated library for React Native. Mainly this was due to my familiarity with react-spring/three.
Call it hubris. Call it laziness. Call it not actually reading the docs completely, but I realized near the end of my animation implementation that react-spring/native runs animations on the JavaScript main thread (duh, in hindsight) and it was absolutely tanking the animation frame rate to a pretty unusable experience.
Instead of rewriting with reanimated, Inchworm fell into the cold, dark, and dank "side projects" folder, destined for "oh yeah, I remember that thing" in perpetuity.
All and all, fun experiment.
Hit me up with any questions or react-spring discussions.
Thanks for reading!