You're Invited

Introducing a new product to the world is always a special pleasure for me. This past weekend I assembled an ad-hoc rapid development team with the objective of building a task management system that could handle a large number of items spawned from numerous sources (click the link above to read a description of the principal behind the system). I am pleased to announce that we have completed our initial alpha prototype, and would like to invite anyone out there who thinks they have a crazy todo list to join up and give it a spin! Keep in mind this is an ALPHA system whose CONCEPT is not even a week old! That being said, there are a few things to know.

First up, we have a bugzilla install at http://bugzilla.scramdac.com, and would really value feedback and bug reports.

Second, you'll need a few tips to get started:

Queues
This system is designed to track your tasks based on their real world sources, and the relative priorities of those real world sources. For example, a weekend project or personal project would be of a relatively lower priority than say, your work tasks, or coursework. Therefore, it is necessary to create at least one queue with at least one relative priority value. Relative priorities are the reverse of what you would think they are. That is, a priority 0 queue is the HIGHEST priority, not the lowest. I would suggest creating a queue with a priority of 10 first, then you can make your additional queues higher or lower priority than that queue (higher being a lower number, and vice versa). It is easy to adjust these priorities later.

Tasks
The bread and butter of the system is the set of tasks that you enter into it. Each task is associated with a given queue, and assigned a "importance" level. Importances are single letters from A-Z, with A importance items being of the highest priority, and Z items being of the lowest priority. You can also enter a description for each task, and an estimated time to complete it (this does nothing right now, but will soon be leveraged for some upcoming features).

ToDo List
The tasks are aggregated into a ToDo list and sorted by a mixture of their importance, and the relative priority of the queue that they are associated with. That is, an A level item from a low priority queue will be lower down on the list than an A importance item from a high priority list. I could explain the algorithm that is used to generate the list, but it is not easy to do so without a graphic, which currently only exists on notebook paper. I will post one soon with a more thorough explaination of how the algorithm actually works in the near future. In the mean time, just experiment until you end up with a balnace that makes sense!

So please! go ahead and give it a try! We would love to hear your feedback on this. Keep in mind that our objective was to create a useful task management tool. Anything beyond that would be pure coincidence (see the blog link above where the product is described for more information about the motivations).

Take care,