When I enter tasks I group them on what week I did this and I would like to keep this information when I roll tasks forward as they keep being not performed. My idea is to keep track of the age of a task, even though I use TaskPaper to plan my work for days to come.
I then wonder if it would be possible to add the current project as a tag to a task and to have that as a command of sorts. This would allow me to keep them alive but still know how old they are without having to add this information by hand (they are in a project/week when I add then so it feels a bit silly to add this information manually, should there exist a nice automated way).
Today I can see on a finished task which project/week it belonged to by ticking the preference checkbox “Add @project tag…” and I assume that it is a mechanism similar to this I am looking for.
I honestly couldn’t follow on what you were trying to accomplish. I am not sure if people reading this are in the same camp, but including an example of sorts may help. Hope you find a system that works with you,
So, imagine we are at week 25 and I have not finished the tasks from the week before. It would be nice if I could move the unfinished tasks from week 24 to week 25 and tag them like this:
That way I can plan ahead and see which tasks are the oldest. Today I keep the weeks as projects which leaves me with a task planner which tells me the age of an item but with no way to see when I have planned to do something:
I hope that this makes better sense. It is not a big deal but I was intrigued by some of the work done by others to realise that there is quite the potential in TaskPaper, hence my question.
These are the things to consider with your system.
The program doesn’t know much about the tasks inside the project other than that they belong to the project itself. If those tasks are moved somewhere else, they loose that identifier.
If you move the project, the program will need to figure out a way to identify where those tasks came from. Taskpaper does some sort of identifying with done tasks by tagging the task with the originating project’s name (something similar to your example.) But there remains the problem that if you have several projects with the same name, that identifier means very little now.
There is not an automatic way to accomplish what you want.
This could be done several different ways. I am going to start with the most obvious but that requires less scripting.
Manual tagging- No code
You could tag your tasks manually so that there is a lot more information about those tasks. This gives you the flexibility to tag your tasks with whatever identifier you feel like. Using text expanders like Alfred or TextExpander, can save your a second here or there.
Then when you move that task to whatever project you want with the provided TaskPaper command “Move To Project” the info is where you want to. Then you are done. No more work done.
Scripting - Easy
Now, when I say easy, I don’t mean that this will be easy for me to do. I am just taking in consideration your system and the information the computer will require. Some time ago, there was a request for a script to “Move to Project” with the option to move the task to the end of the Project instead of the beginning of it.
I am assuming that it would not be very difficult to modify that script so that it adds a tag similar to what TaskPaper does to the done tags to identify the parent project – @project(parentprojectname) --. Just know the following.
That script is old. I am assuming it probably needs to be updated to work. You can probably see the errors, and some recent script examples to get it working yourself.
I don’t know how to script. You will probably need to ask SUPER nicely to @complexpoint or @jessegrosjean for them to modify the mentioned script to add the tag “@project(parentprojectname)” to your task while doing the moving. Usually just tagging them is enough, but wait for when they have a chance to think and do it.
Now, I was going to add another option, but I think that those cover your request. I know that I wasn’t the most helpful in actually getting your request done; but I hope that this helps by pointing at how you can get it done and who you need to ask.
so here goes.