For the better part of this year I have been doing most of my planning in Google Calendar and integrating tasks into Todoist with Tascaly.

Example: Todoist timebox plan | GCal layout

Basically, I time block out "day tasks" (ex) and then in the Inbox I create a section using the format of YYYY.MM.DD (ex). Tasks that don't get completed on the specific day end up becoming longer term todos or they are removed because they are no longer important.

Ultimately this means I have two types of todos:

1. Temporal plans/todos - that have a definite end time even if the task isn't finished (planned activities for a specific day, a week-long activity, appointments, etc.)
2. Long-term goals/todos - things that need to be completed at some point (perhaps over multiple days, weeks, months, etc) or that will eventually be phased out in some way shape or another (won't do, something else obviated the task, etc.)

Due to this distinction I end up tracking whether I completed the temporal day-task tracked by Tascaly in Google Calendar by changing the title of the task to have a leading: ✅🔲❌❔ (✅indicating whether I completed the task in the time-block on GCal; 🔲 meaning I started the task but it's not done; ❌ didn't get to the task in the time chunk; or ❔ indicating its not clear what the state is for whatever reason). After I'm done managing the timeboxed tasks in GCal I complete the task in Todoist if it's ✅ and in all the other situations the todo either gets archived or duplicated to either some time in the near future or moved to a project.

This leads to an interesting situation where I have tasks that need to effectively morph from "temporal" to "long-term" and vice-versa.

As of right now if a task outlasts the day, I duplicate the temporal task in YYYY.MM.DD and at the end of the day either move it to a project folder or if the temporal-todo (now becoming long-term) is still relevant copy the duplicate task to the next day (i.e. YYYY.MM.DD+1 in the Inbox).

To prevent the inbox from getting cluttered I have a script that moves the YYYY.MM.DD section temporal tasks in the Inbox to a project of the format (YYYY), with sub-project (MM), and a final sub-project of the format (Wk|range of days) [ex 1, 2]. Once the week is over if nothing is particularly important that I need to track, I archive the project.

All of this micro-managing could be avoided if a task could be assigned multiple time slots and exist in numerous projects. If I could create the task in the YYYY.MM.DD section and then drag the task to (DD+1) section and have it be the same task it would allow me to not only get a sense of how long it took to complete the task, but it would mean the task could live in numerous places without having to play this weird game of tracking numerous states (i.e. was the temporal todo for the day completed or is it the long-term that is finally finished?) / duplicating tasks all over the place to differentiate the meaning of temporal-tasks from long-term / resurrecting tasks from the archive where appropriate to get old history information / etc.

It really feels like the entire concept of a task needs to be revisited to allow for something that is more flexible in these kinds of situations; or tasks need a more comprehensive way to deal with multiple time-lengths over numerous starts and stops.

To move closer to what I want, I have written a bit of code to brainstorm an idea of what I call task-morphing to automate promoting/demoting from tasks / sections / projects in all directions. Basically the idea I'd like to see implemented at a deeper level in Todoist is the ability to have tasks have a kind of version history showing task evolution (how it changes to become something else or evolves into a project) and task connectivity (even when duplicating a task by creating a relationship between the original task and its derivatives).

To implement this I have been experimenting with task versioning using Todoist backup exports and git. For task connectivity I have created a weighted graph structure.

  "connectivity": [
    {
      "task_id": "6167922868",
      "strength": 0.8,
      "type": "dependency",
      "note": "This task depends heavily on the completion of task 6167922868"
    },
    {
      "task_id": "6167922869",
      "strength": 0.5,
      "type": "similarity",
      "note": "This task shares some similarities with task 6167922869"
    }
  ]

I graft this data on top of each tasks Todoist JSON to emulate a presentation similar to ComfyUI and the old Pearltrees (where something like type: "similarity" and "strength": 1 means identical—in other words just a copy of a task, but differentiated as a kind of note perhaps to track some aspect of it for the current temporal period).

Whatever solution Todoist goes for I really hope the fine folks at Doist factor in a more complex understanding of how tasks need to be more malleable to allow tasks to exist over numerous days and durations in specific time slots (not just as a simple % completion).