Praefectus

Praefectus is a Getting Things Done (GTD) framework that helps to manage your tasks.

⚠ Currently the project is in the planning state, nothing is ready yet.

General Description

Praefectus is a modern GTD framework that allows you to store the information on all sorts of your current tasks, manage them, view their change history, import or export from/into various sources.

It is also a task planning framework: it allows to schedule the tasks and predict their real schedule.

It is mainly distributed as a .NET library (and a bit of configuration and programming knowledge is required to use it), and offers an optional terminal UI (inspired by Taskwarrior) and an API for programmatic access to all of its entities.

Praefectus is configured in an unorthodox way: technically, you create your own application that uses the Praefectus API (and configures it accordingly to your needs), and then execute it with your data.

Documentation

1. Development Process
2. Configuration
3. Data Storage
4. Task Ordering

RFCs

• Command Line Interface: an RFC for the issue #13: Simple UI/UX to navigate the database
• Tasks and Attributes: an RFC for the issue #6: Foundational concept design: task attributes
• Version Control: an RFC for the issue #7: Foundational concept design: version control

Prerequisites

Praefectus is a .NET 5.0 library. To use it on your own, .NET 5.0 SDK is required.

Build

To build the library, tests and the example application, run the following command in the terminal:

$ dotnet build --configuration Release

Setting Up Your Project

See the example application that is built on Praefectus in the Praefectus.Example directory. See [the corresponding documentation section][docs.2.setting-up-your-project] on details.

Configure

By default, Praefectus will use the praefectus.json file found in the same directory as the executable file. Default configuration distributed alongside the console client will only set up the logging framework. See more information in the configuration documentation.

Run

See the command line interface documentation on possible arguments that may be passed to the application that's built on Praefectus; pass --help to see the option list.

To start the example application in the development mode, run the following command in the terminal:

$ dotnet run --project Praefectus.Console -- [arguments…]

Test

To execute the automatic test suite, run the following command in the terminal:

$ dotnet test --configuration Release

Questions

Why not Taskwarrior?

Praefectus is very much inspired by Taskwarrior in many of its features. But, while it's very good, Taskwarrior lacks some main features I'd like to see in a GTD application:

1. It should be cross-platform. I'm sorry, but "POSIX-only" is not cross-platform. It is hard to use on Windows, while it shouldn't be.
2. I would like to add thorough notes for every task. Taskwarrior allows adding annotations, but these aren't very convenient.
3. Repeated task functionality in Taskwarrior is a bit messy (in how it handles dates: e.g. wait date will move together with the new tasks, but the scheduled one won't).
4. Taskwarrior offers a very centralized way to manage the tasks. If you have multiple devices, then you'll have to either use a file synchronization software to manage these or set up the Taskserver.
5. Taskserver is aggressively non-cross-platform, I wasn't able to run it on my computers at all.
6. Taskwarrior has no convention of task progress: you can't say to it that this task is 90% done so probably it'll take less time to finish it.
7. Taskwarrior is not a planning application. It has no good schedule view to show the upcoming tasks.
8. The task constraints (e.g. due) are non-transitive: if my task with due=tomorrow depends on some other tasks with no constrains, Taskwarrior won't tell me about it (aside from slightly increasing these tasks' urgency).
9. Taskwarrior doesn't offer an embedded periodic import/export capabilities (e.g. to sync with GitHub or some other task/issue lists).
10. Taskwarrior "API" (the command line one) is not the best: e.g. it has no easy way to deal with the escapes in the Windows' command line (this significantly complicates its usage from other programs on that particular platform).
11. Taskwarrior doesn't perform automatic backups (believe or not, I have developed a habit of backing up all of my task files every morning, and it saved me a lot of times).

Overall, Taskwarrior is a very good application, and I recommend it to you. But it doesn't solve all of my needs, and thus I've decided to develop a GTD application that will try to do it.

Many of these issues may be solved by developing additional habits, writing scripts, shell aliases or via various automation, I agree with that. But the fact is that Taskwarrior doesn't offer these tools out-of-the-box — and it is arguable whether it should or not; we'll see!

Features

Cross-platform

Praefectus is written in .NET and runs on any platform supported by .NET.

User interface

Praefectus has a query tool (Taskwarrior-like), and a Text UI dashboard application that runs in any terminal.

Decentralized

Praefectus supports various decentralized update scenarios via the concept of nodes: these nodes may not all be directly connected, but will still deliver tasks to the user.

Automated import

While most of Praefectus nodes are Praefectus application instances running over various devices or over the network, some of them are programmatic ones: for example, all GitHub issues for one particular user may be considered as being managed by one node, your internal homegrown bugtracker is another one, a directory with a bunch of markdown notes, a Git repository with backups, literally any API could be a Praefectus node.

Praefectus knows a task history for each node, and it will allow multiple nodes to manage single issue. Conflict resolution is sometimes performed automatically and is sometimes up to the user. For example, you may import a GitHub issue, then add some annotations to it, change its status and then export it back: depending on your settings, the status may be synchronized back to GitHub (e.g. an issue will be closed), and your annotations may be left on a Praefectus node that authored them.

Automated export

Some nodes may support Praefectus export, so it will automatically flow the changes to these nodes.

Task history

Each node has its own history for every task. Conflicts are inevitable in a decentralized world, so Praefectus allows you to manage them in case they occur. Out-of-band conflict resolution (either in Praefectus itself or in any external merge tool) is supported.

Task management

Start tasks, merge tasks from different sources, annotate your tasks: anything you expect to see in a good task management application is here in Praefectus.

(A bit of) artificial intelligence

Praefectus tries to be useful with some small AI components in it: it will try to derive the tasks' completion percents and task estimation based on simple machine learning algorithms. Everything it presumes then should be approved by a human, so don't worry, machines aren't (yet) going to take over your tasks.

Task progress

Praefectus is aware of the task progress: task may be 50% done — and Praefectus known about your cognitive bias in estimating the progress, thanks to AI!

Praefectus also allows you to specify the task value, and it will try to maximize the value you gather when making your schedule.

Programmable

Praefectus has good APIs for both external programs and internal scripts.

Schedules

Praefectus uses some small achievements of the modern theory of economy to manage the schedules: it shows critical paths in solving the tasks, automatically applies transitive constraints, has an ability to show Gantt(-ish) charts.

Delegation

Praefectus supports some small bits of multi-actor task management: you may mark your tasks as delegated to someone else, manage and control their work load and their schedules. Praefectus is still a personal task management application, not an enterprise one. But in our daily work/life, we often have to delegate some work, and Praefectus is aware of it.

Fun

It is a mandatory detail that working on the Praefectus project should be fun. And I hope it will be fun to work with Praefectus for the users.