Rambling Pete's Task List on Steroids

A flexible todo list that starts simple, but provides great flexibility

Piet Strydom

Overview

Executive summary

- Different views of one logical, consistent table, ensuring every task with a date is in one place.

⁠

Very Simple Tasks⁠

Birthdays⁠

Appointments⁠

, Simple lists of date entries

⁠

General Todo List Simple⁠

, A list of all the above lists in one place

⁠

Shopping list⁠

, A longer list excluded from the abovementioned General Todo

⁠

ProjectLite View⁠

gantProjectLite⁠

Use groupings to combine tasks that go together

Rambling Pete’s Shopping List on Steroids is designed to be a very simple to use list to manage date driven tasks.

You start out by creating

Very Simple Tasks⁠

with just a task name, a date and a checkbox to mark completion. It is also very simple to capture

Birthdays⁠

. Add the person to the colPerson column. (The name will be added to a checklist, and will not need to be captured again). Once you have sent your congratulations, click on the “Move to Next Year” button to schedule a reminder for next year.

The next step up is probably to schedule

Appointments⁠

. Obviously for this a time is needed as well. Add the topic or purpose under colTask, e.g. the doctor’s name if it is a doctor’s appointment. In colPerson, add the person for whom the appointment is.

Having three separate lists, does not seem very simple, does it? However the simplicity comes in that all of these lists, are stored in the same table. So far all that we have done, is to use views of that table, tailored to the specific list that we want to maintain. To see everything that needs to take place on a specific day, use the

General Todo List Simple⁠

view to see everything that needs to happen for the next few days. You can select at the top of the view the number of days into the future that you would like to see. Note that now the view is grouped by the date, so that all of one day’s activities is in one block. This enables increasingly complex topics to be added, while keeping everything still in one table, with the option to see everything in a single view.

Topics. To be able to group the tasks into different views, each view was assigned a default Topic, SimpleList, Birthday and Appointment so far. Other entries that are available to use in the standard implementation is Shopping List, Reading List and Other Topics.

If you want to create your own Topics, you can do so by simply typing it into the colTopic column. This is handy if you want to group together a number of tasks. (Much more on this later on.) These Topics will show up in the General Todo Lists. You can also create your own View that filters only that topic, so that you can see them all grouped together.

Slightly more complex

You can also use this todo list to manage your

shopping list⁠

. By default the Topic Shopping list is EXCLUDED from the General views, as a 20 item shopping list will just clutter the list. If you would like to have a reminder in your General views, create an entry with the Topic “Other Topics” with the task Do Grocery Shopping or something similar. The Shopping view (as all other views) can be called up on your mobile, and the items mark as completed as you purchase them.

The Shopping List View adds four new columns. The first is the column colExplanation. This is a generic column for any comments on any of the lists. For the Shopping list you could use it to split the list between different stores. The column colItemDescription is where you record the items to be purchased. Again, this has a check table behind it, and once you have added an item to the list, it will always be available for reuse. The last two columns are self explanatory - a quantity and a unit of measure column.

As mentioned before, sometimes several tasks are related to each other, and you would like to keep track of them. As an example, there is a colTopic Project1, with an accompanying

ProjectLite View⁠

. I have created a simple project to purchase a new property. New on this view are two sub task columns that will give you three levels of details in the project. The next new column is called Details Page. This is a free text column, anything can be recorded here. In this example, it links to an area lower on this page where information about the Property Search can be recorded. Any URL, e.g. the agent’s website, could also be recorded here. The time column is back, in case one of the tasks is an appointment.

Record the tasks that needs to be performed as required. The report is groups by Topic, Task, Sub task and sub task 2.

However, it is always good to have a Gant view as well, especially if the dates of some of the lower level tasks overlap with ones in other groups. This is shown in

gantProjectLite⁠

. And in this view, it immediately stands out that the last task “Make Decision and Make Offer” needs attention, because on the 16th the meetings with the experts have not taken place yet. So either the meetings needs to be scheduled earlier, or the decision postponed.

Using the filter control at the top of the Projectlite View, it is possible to switch topics. Bear in mind that for the Gant chart to work, both a start date and the duration must be maintained.

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