busy 3.4.4

Personal time management system

Busy

Busy is a personal time management tool, designed to help us all through our crazy busy days with as little stress as possible. It's simple, fast, and fun to use.

Usage

Principles

Busy is built with the following usage principles in mind:

• Monotasking: We each focus better when we work on exactly one task at a time. So busy only shows you one task.
• Keyboard-driven: Productive people use the keyboard effectively, because muscle memory builds up over time, and it's faster to hit a key than to find an icon on a screen and move the pointer.
• Offline use: It's designed to run on your laptop or desktop computer, without needing an internet connection, so it works extremely fast under any conditions.
• Multi-platform Because Busy is a terminal-based application, it will run on MacOS, Linux, or Windows.
• Personal: Busy is not a collaboration platform or project management application. It's for managing your personal time, not assigning things to others.
• Importance over Urgency: Stop stressing out over last-minute tasks and impending deadlines! Busy makes it easy to capture future tasks and remember to do them early enough to reduce the pressure.
• Editable data: The data is stored in text files, which can easily be edited outside of Busy itself. (In fact, Busy started as a todo.txt type of approach and grew from there.)

The idea of Importance over Urgency comes from the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People". Although we firmly disagree with Steven Covey's statements on gay rights, the book contains excellent ideas.

Installation

You'll need a terminal emulator to access a command or shell prompt. Examples include:

• iTerm2 or Terminal on MacOS
• Gnome Terminal or XTerm on Linux
• CMD on Windows
• Terminator on all platforms

Busy also requires Python 3.6.5 or later. To check whether you already have the right version of Python on your system, start your terminal emulator and type:

python -V

If that doesn't work, try:

python3 -V

If you don't have Python, or your version is out of date, install or upgrade it. In most cases, you'll want to do so using your system's package manager (such as Homebrew on MacOS or APT on Linux). If you're not familiar with package managers, then download Python from the Python.org site directly and follow the instructions provided there. When done, use the version check above to confirm it's installed and the version is 3.6.5 or greater.

Python comes with PIP, which enables installation of Python packages from a central server called PyPI.

From now on, we're going to use python3 and pip3 in code snippets, although your system might prefer simply python or pip. Just edit them.

Windows only Install Python from the Microsoft store, but then use pip install windows-curses to install curses.

Python developers only Busy does require other packages, so feel free to use a venv.

Here's the command to install the latest stable version of Busy itself:

sudo pip3 install busy && pip3 show busy

If you have previously installed Busy, and want to upgrade to the latest version, type:

sudo pip3 install --upgrade busy && pip3 show busy

Overview

Busy ships with 2 user interfaces, both of them terminal-based and keyboard-driven:

• Shell UI - A command-line interface (CLI) using shell conventions and called directly from the shell, one command at a time.
• Curses UI - A faster, more visual interface with one-key commands that remains visible the entire time it's being used.

Some commands also use your favorite terminal-based text editor, such as Emacs, vi, or Nano. It's possible to use Busy without a text editor, but functionality is limited.

Busy's core model is a collection of Items, the most interesting of which are Tasks. Items are organized into Queues, which are ordered sets. You work on the top Task in the Queue, and when it's done, that Task gets removed from the Queue to reveal the next one. There is a default Queue (called "tasks") but you can also create other Queues, for example a shopping list or discussion list.

In addition to the "tasks" Queue, Busy maintains the "plans" Queue for future tasks (don't worry about them yet!) and the "done" Queue as a record of what's been completed in the past.

Using the Shell UI

To get started, add some Tasks to your default Queue.

busy add "Take a shower"
busy add "Do the laundry"
busy add "Phone mom"
busy add "Donate to the Busy project"

Then, when you're ready to start your day, ask Busy what to do first:

busy top

Returns:

Take a shower

Yes, Busy is great for tracking daily, personal, habitual tasks in addition to work tasks. It feels great to mark things as done!

When you've finished that task, mark it off to find the next task.

busy finish

It will ask you to confirm that you're done. Then request the next task:

busy top

Which will tell you what to do next:

Do the laundry

If you want to see the whole Queue, with sequence numbers, type:

busy list

Here's the list you will see. Note that the completed Task is gone:

1  Do the laundry
2  Phone mom
3  Donate to the Busy project

If you decide, in the moment, to wait until later today to perform a task, drop it to the bottom of the Queue using the drop command:

busy drop

Then busy list will return:

1  Phone mom
2  Donate to the Busy project
3  Do the laundry

If you see a task on the list that seems urgent, and you intend to perform it immediately, pop it to the top of the list:

busy pop 2

Our use of the term "pop" for a command doesn't quite fit with the computing term "pop". It might change in the future.

Then busy get will return:

Donate to the Busy project

Let's say you realize that it's not an appropriate task for today, but you want to defer it to tomorrow:

busy defer

It will ask you to confirm "tomorrow" as the day for deferral. Agree with it for now.

At the start of a new day, tell Busy to add all the previously deferred Tasks to the current Queue:

busy activate

Commands

Here's a summary of the commands in Busy.

• add adds a new item to the bottom of the queue. The item description may be included after the command or written to stdin (i.e. typed on the next line).
• top gets the top item in the queue, referred to as the "current" item. There are no options.
• list lists the items in the queue in order with their sequence numbers.
• pop moves a task or set of items to the top of a queue.
• drop moves a task or set of items to the bottom of a queue.
• delete permanently removes a task or set of items from a queue.
• edit opens a text editor to edit items - the default is to edit only the top item.
• manage is the same as edit, but defaults to edit the whole queue.
• finish removes a task or tasks from the tasks queue and adds it to the done queue, so it's complete. Good job!
• defer removes a task or set of tasks from the tasks queue and schedules it or them to reappear at a future date in the plans queue.
• activate moves current tasks from the plans queue to the tasks queue. Get to work!
• queues to list all the queues.
• tags to list all the tags.

Except for add and top, commands allow the designation of specific items to be acted upon. Item designation can be performed using sequence numbers or tags.

Sequence numbers

Sequence numbers appear in the output from the list command. Note that the numbering starts with 1, and is not an ID -- the number of a item will change when the queue is modified. So always reference the most recent output from the list command.

To designate more than one item, separate the sequence numbers with a space.

When used to designate items, a range of sequence numbers is separated by a hyphen, with no whitespace, and is inclusive. For example, 4-6 designates items 4, 5, and 6. A hyphen without a number after it includes all the items from that item to the end of the queue. A hyphen on its own indicates the last item in the queue.

Below are some examples of task designations by sequence number.

• busy pop 5 pops item number 5
• busy drop 3-7 drops items 3 through 7 (4 items)
• busy list 3- lists all the items from number 3 through the end of the list
• busy delete 3 5 7 9 deletes only the items designated
• busy defer - defers the last task
• busy edit -4 is an error! Use busy edit 1-4 instead
• busy manage allows you to edit the entire queue

Items will always be handled in the order they appear in the queue, regardless of the order the criteria are provided. So for example, if a pop command designates some items, they will be moved to the top of the queue in the order, relative to each other, they currently appear in the queue.

The sequence numbers in the list command output are from the queue itself. So the list command does not modify the sequence numbers, even when item designation is applied.

Tags

Items can have tags, which are space-separated hashtags in the item description. An item can have no tags, one tag, or more than one tag. For example the following item description has the tag "errands":

go to the supermarket #errands

Tags cannot contain punctuation.

Hash tags may be used for item designation, in which case the hash itself ("#") is omitted from the command line. For example, the following command will move all the items with the #errands tag to the top of the queue.

busy pop errands

Whitespace-separated item designation criteria are additive -- that is, a logical OR. For example, the following command will delete all the admin tasks, sales tasks, and tasks 3 and 4.

busy delete admin sales 3 4

Default item designations

For the most part, commands that accept item designations default to only act on the top item in the queue. The exceptions are:

• list defaults to list the entire queue
• pop defaults to pop the last item in the queue to the top
• activate defaults to activate items for today (more on that below)

Alternate queues

Busy will manage any number of queues, which are entirely separate ordered sets of items. For example, you might have a shopping queue for items to buy at the store, and a movies queue for films you'd like to watch. The default queue is called tasks and has special properties related to planning.

To designate an alternate queue, use the --queue option on a command. For example:

busy add "Skimmed Milk" --queue shopping
busy top --queue movies

Managing plans

The default tasks queue supports several specific commands related to planning -- that is, scheduling tasks for the future. They are finish, defer, and activate. The task-specific commands do not accept a --queue modifier, because they only work on the default tasks queue. Planned tasks are kept in another special queue called plans, and completed tasks are kept in a queue called done.

The task commands accept item designations. The defer and finish commands reference the tasks queue; the activate command references the plans queue. The default for defer and finish is the top item in the tasks queue; the default for activate is to activate only plans deferred to today or earlier.

Planning by date

Planning is by date, not time, and is relative to the current date according to the system clock.

In the defer command, the date can be specified using the --to or --for option (they are interchangable). If the options are omitted, then the date can be provided as input.

The date may take any of the following forms:

• A specific date in YYYY-MM-DD format, such as 2018-10-28. Slashes are also acceptable, but the order is always year, then month, then day.
• A specific date without the year in MM-DD format, such as 7-4, which will defer the item to that date in the future (even if it's in the next year).
• A specific day of the month as a simple integer, such as 12, which will defer the item to that day of the month, in either the current month or the next month.
• An integer, a space, and the word day or days, such as 4 days, which will defer the item to that number of days from today.
• An integer without a space and the letter d, such as 4d, which is a short form of 4 days.
• The word tomorrow, which is also the default if no date is provided.
• The word today, which is a little odd but obvious.

As an example, the following command will defer tasks 4, 5, and 6 from the tasks queue to the date 4 days from today, keeping them in the plans queue until that date.

busy defer 4-6 --for 4 days

Note that the plans queue is keeping the task information (verbatim from the tasks queue) along with the date information (as an absolute date).

To pull tasks off the plans queue and put them back on the tasks queue, use the activate command. There are two ways to use the activate command:

• With no item designation, in which case Busy activates all the tasks scheduled for today or earlier, bringing the tasks list up to date
• With designated items from the plans queue; note that the activate command accepts item designation from the plans queue itself

Finishing and following up

Like defer, the finish command only works on the tasks queue. It removes the designated Task (or the top task if none is designated) from the queue and adds it to the done queue, with today's date to indicate when it was completed.

Optionally, a task can have a followon, which is another task to be added to the queue after the first task is finished. Followons are described in a task using an arrow notation. In the following example, the task "eat" has a followon task "drink":

eat --> drink

Note that the hyphens and whitespace are optional; really the marker that matters for delimiting a followon is the right angle bracket (">"). Also note that right angle bracket is not a valid character in a task description.

When the finish command is executed on the task above, the "eat" task will be recorded as "done" and the "drink" task will be added to the bottom of the tasks queue.

Note that followons can be chained. For example, when the finish command is run on the task illustrated below, a new task "drink > be merry" will be added to the queue. Only when that Task is finished will the "be merry" task itself appear on the queue.

eat > drink > be merry

Repeating tasks

A special type of followon is the repeat. In this case, instead of adding the next task to the bottom of the queue, the entire current task -- including the Followon itself -- is entered into the plans queue at some point in the future. Repeats allow for easy management of repeating tasks. Some examples follow.

• check email --> repeat in 1 day
• phone mom --> repeat on sunday
• balance the checkbook --> repeat on 6

The exact syntax for a Repeat is the word "repeat" followed by either "on" or "in" and a relative date phrase -- the same phrases that work with the defer command.

Note that the repetition itself only happens on the finish command. The completed task (i.e. "check email") is entered in the done queue and then the entire task (with the Repeat) is scheduled in the plans queue for the appropriate time in the future.

Editing items

The edit and manage commands launch the user's default text editor to directly edit a task, the whole queue, or part of a queue. Note that edit and manage are identical commands except for their defaults.

The definition of the "default text editor" depends on the OS and configuration but here's the logic:

1. Try the EDITOR environment variable
2. If that doesn't exist, try the sensible-editor command (Ubuntu)
3. If that doesn't exist, try the open -W command (OSX)

You must quit the editor to accept the change back into Busy.

The edit command with no criteria will edit the top item in the queue, and the manage command with no criteria will edit the entire queue. But it's also possible to designate items to be edited with both commands. The commands do their best to replace the edited items in place in the list order. So if you edit or manage a tag whose items are recently popped (at the top of the queue), then the edited items will still appear at the top. Even if you add items, they will be inserted after the last item in the edited set, not at the end of the queue. But all the items brought up in the editor will be edited. So if you remove an item in the editor, it will be deleted and the others will be moved up to take its place.

For faster daily use - the Curses UI

Busy suports multiple user interfaces. The command line interface described above is the shell interface. The alternative is the curses UI, which draws an entirely new terminal in the same window.

We get it - "curses" is a terrible name. It's a reference to the underlying technology. It's likely to change.

As of now, the curses UI only supports the tasks queue. The commands can be triggered with single keystrokes, and only act on their default tasks (usually the top task). The UI always displays the current queue (which is always tasks for now) and the current (top) task at the top of the screen.

To invoke the curses UI, type:

busy curses

Commands within the UI are shown with a single letter underlined. The underlined letter is the keystroke that will invoke the command. Use q to quit. When inside a command, use ctrl-C to cancel the command and return to the main menu.

Data storage

Busy keeps the queues in plain text files, so if the tool doesn't do something you want, you may edit the files. The files are in a directory together, referred to as the "root". Each file is the name of the queue with a .txt extension. If a required file is missing, it will be created automatically. So typically, the root includes tasks.txt, plans.txt, done.txt, and any number of custom queue files.

Technically, Busy data files are pipe-delimited data files, though tasks.txt and any custom queues only have one field ("description") while plans.txt and done.txt have only two fields (date and description).

Busy is not a database (yet). There is no support for managing separate fields in the Busy tool itself.

The root is designated in one of the following ways, which are tried in order.

• The --root option on any command
• The BUSY_ROOT environment variable, if no --root option is provided
• A directory at ~/.busy, which will be generated as needed if no --root option or BUSY_ROOT environment variable are provided,

Note that the --root option must come after busy but command-specific options (--yes, --to, --for, and --queue) must come after commands.

The following example shows the --root option with command-specific options on the same command line.

busy --root ~/.config/busy defer --to tuesday

Note that Busy does not support concurrency in any form. If two commands are executing at the same time, they might overwrite each other. Overwriting is especially risky with the edit command, which keeps the user's editor open until they close it.

The format is designed to be simple (i.e. non-default queues are really just lists of items) but not idiot-proof. Experimentation might result in unintended consequences.

Development

The code is intended to demonstrate some Python best practices:

• Object-oriented with classes and subclasses.
• Dynamic configuration using a unique approach we call "class families" - for example, the names of the commands are properties of the command classes, not in a big "if" statement.
• Extensive testing with >90% test coverage, guaranteed by CI.
• Leverage the standard library by requiring 3rd party PIP modules for development, but not for usage.

To set everything up:

sudo pip3 install vernum coverage pycodestyle twine

To get the full repo:

git clone [e-mail]:fpotter/tools/busy.git

We use Visual Studio Code to build Busy, so there is a VS Code configuration file in the repository.

Then to run the test suite:

make test

Or to run test coverage:

make cover

And to check style:

make style

Note to self: To publish a new build, use 'vernum' with 'major', 'minor', or 'patch' depending on how major the changes were since the last build. Then push. GitLab allows you to publish to PyPI in its UI, and only when Vernum has been run.

Command summary

Below is a reference list of all commands, handy to correlate the one-letter version with the full version. The one-letter version is used in the curses UI, and is an alternative option in the shell UI. Some of the listed commands are yet to be implemented; they are listed here merely to reserve their names.

Short	Full
a	add
c	activate
d	delete
e	edit
f	defer
l	list
m	manage
n	finish
p	pop
q	quit (only in interactive UI)
r	drop
s	shuffle
t	tags
u	queues (list)
w	switch (queues)
	curses (only in shell UI)
	top