Tracking my every day's tasks/ToDo list has always been a never-ending problem for me during these years! For each of my personal domain tasks and issues, I used a different system to track them. For some, I was relying on my (not-so-good) memory so was missing some of them as a natural side effect :-) Many were getting written on paper sticky notes pasted on my monitor, desktop as well as handling the rest electronically and writing them down in word documents, simple text files and so on. I was tired of all these inconsistencies...
After all, I didn't have a centralized system to see all my tasks in one shot and have a report on them. I had different category problems to track such as my general (non-business) tasks, many of my open source activities, a few business related ones and so on. You see they're not a flat ToDo list but domain/project based and kinda hierarchical and many daily-task-organizer softwares do not have the hierarchical management of the issues.
Anyways, after having a bit of ups and downs with the options I had, just decided to use the same great software, I'm using to track the software projects issues & bugs at work (as many of you do), to fulfill my needs at home :-) Yes! I'm talking about Atlassian JIRA j2ee-based issue tracking software. Well, it's gonna be the third day I'm using it and am really satisfied. Perhaps a new use-case for JIRA. Some of you may complain that it's not the right software to do these kinds of trackings but as for me at home it's doing the job well and greatly fits my needs (so far at least).
Now I have all my tasks in one place and have defined different categories (called "Project" in JIRA) for them. At any moment I can request the latest status report of my whole in-progress or later ToDo tasks and it provides me a great overview of what I'm doing everyday and hugely decreases the risk of missing an issue. Moreover I can customize the filters (read "Reports") how I want and even add some more in addition to the default ones. What else do I need ?!
So far so good!
Armond
Posted by armond at October 23, 2003 12:39 PMYou could have a look at generating todo-lists using XDoclet. It's described in the "Java Development with Ant" book by Erik Hatcher.
Basically writing comments like these in your code: "@todo This needs fixing!", then an Ant task to generate your report (I think the XDoclet docs has an example of it).
Also, I do agree that JIRA is really nice...
Posted by: Magnus at October 24, 2003 09:40 AMWell, using XDoclet can be fine but as you're mentioning too it only can be good for the code related todo lists not your general everyday's tasks...
Posted by: Armond Avanes at October 25, 2003 09:04 AMRespect yourself, or no one else will respect you...
Posted by: Gentile at June 15, 2004 03:54 AM