Instead, I’ve changed to just Taskpaper (at least the elements that OmniFocus uses) as this allows me to copy items over directly when I am ready to do so, and also to export easily. This means I would never check the tasks off. This does give you the look of pretty checkboxes - but the point of your Someday/Maybe list isn’t to keep of what you have done, but what you want to do. As I mentioned I started in Drafts so as of when I recorded an episode of Nested Folders 11: Someday/Maybe/Never I was still using - to indicate a task. To keep things organised I start these file names with an underscore (_) and then add a note below the task to see that file.įinally: Format. If a project has more than 10 tasks that I want to document I create a special list for it. Projects/tasks stay within these lists until they become unwieldy. Someday is “I really want to do this and will make time for it, but that time is not now”, whereas Maybe is “I like the sound of this”. I have two primary lists, Someday and Maybe. To be clear, I use Working Copy for the Git side of things and Textastic for the writing.
There’s good documentation on how to connect the two of them together so I won’t go into detail on that here. On iOS I use two apps Working Copy and Textastic. I could use the command line, but I usually don’t want to. That said, sometimes I switch up my apps so I also have SourceTree around to handle the Git stuff. As mentioned above, on macOS I use BBEdit, this has Git integration so I can theoretically do everything with that. Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty! Let’s start with the apps. You can even do a diff, compare two files side by side so see exactly what was added or removed! Version control, in this case, Git, automatically stores what changed and when. Now, I can make a change to my Someday/Maybe lists from any device, including the web, and just type why I changed it. (That said, the sample to accompany this blog post is on GitHub because I know most people are more familiar with that!) There are quite a few services out there offering these, I chose to use Git and to use GitLab for this. Version Control systems are designed for programming, so you can track who changed what, when, and assuming they wrote a decent commit message to accompany the change, why.
These are my preferred text-based file editing apps on macOS and iOS, but alone neither of them really hit the spot - until I decided to take some lessons from the professional side of my life and use Version Control.
Next, I did some digging around and stumbled across my old friends BBEdit and Textastic.
While Drafts is the right tool for many jobs, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for here. Drafts has versions - which satisfies my want to be able to look back in time, but it lacks explicit change messages connected to these. This is nice and visual but doesn’t offer all the other features I wanted without setting up lots of actions and cobbling things together. I started in Drafts, using the task format. This is a sample task in the format I started with