ekad

README

ekad (ek)

A funny series of letters which has a nice prefix to type: ek.

What

Typically task management software is "list"- or "tree"- based, this is an attempt at making a graph-based task management software.

• List-based is, as it sounds, just a series of things in a list that you need to accomplish.

• Tree-based is the same as "list-based," except that you can make sub-tasks of tasks which must be completed for the super-task to be marked as done. These are called tree based because they resemble trees in graph theory.

• Graph-based is the generalization of trees into any directed acyclic graph.

Why

I've often been frustrated by the way in which list- or tree-based task management software fails to capture complexity in real work. This means I have to keep more information in my head (B and C are subtasks of A, but B needs to be done before C can be started), and doesn't let me use computers to solve cool problems like optimal resource allocation for planning.

I'm betting that a graph-based approach will help to some degree with both of these problems!

Several folks have written about this before, or implemented versions of this:

• James Fisher on the TODO DAG.
• The app Intention, which implements a DAG.
• taskdb.
• The now-dead masterplan.so, which is immortalized on Hacker News.
• And probably a bunch more!

None of these felt quite right to me, so I wanted to give in to my hubris and try to make it myself!

How

If you have go installed:

# NOTE: I'll pin this to a version when I feel like I have something releaseable.
go install github.com/crockeo/ekad@latest

License

MIT Open Source License, refer to LICENSE for details.