taskcheck 1.4.0

A Taskwarrior scheduler for people who want a realistic plan, not a manual to-do list. It turns tasks, working hours, and calendar blocks into an actionable schedule — then keeps due dates visible.

Use it if you want to:

• stop guessing what to do next
• fit tasks into real availability
• be sure your long-time plan won't go overdue
• keep Taskwarrior as the source of truth

[!IMPORTANT] This repo is actively maintained again

Features

• ✨ Auto-schedule tasks from working hours + calendar blocks
• 🧭 Support complex working-hour maps
• ⏱️ Consider urgency, due dates, and dependencies
• 🧪 Dry-run mode to preview changes
• ↩️ Undo the latest schedule update
• 🧠 Auto-adjust urgency when deadlines cannot be met
• 🔄 Force-refresh iCal calendars
• 📊 Custom reports for planned and unplanned tasks
• 🎨 Report styling with emoji and extra attributes
• 🗓️ Block time with iCal or Google Calendar, including all-day events

Quick start

1. pipx install taskcheck
2. taskcheck --install ← setup only
3. add estimated + time_map UDAs
4. edit ~/.config/task/taskcheck.toml (see Reference)
5. taskcheck --schedule
6. taskcheck --undo restores the scheduling fields changed by the latest run

How it works

Taskcheck reads your pending and waiting tasks, estimates when each one can be worked on, and writes back a schedule. It respects:

• your working hours
• task duration estimates
• calendar events and vacations from iCal / Google Calendar
• task urgency and due dates

It updates Taskwarrior with:

• scheduled → when work should start
• completion_date → when work is expected to finish
• a warning when a task will miss its due date

Required UDAs

• estimated: expected duration in hours
• time_map: which working-hour profile applies to the task, for example work or weekend

Example:

[time_maps.work]
monday = [[9, 12.30], [14, 17]]
tuesday = [[9, 12.30], [14, 17]]

Reports

• taskcheck -r today → tasks planned for today
• taskcheck -r 1w → tasks planned for the next week

Reference

📚 Full reference: REFERENCE.md

In short:

• taskcheck --install is interactive
• it installs required Taskwarrior settings if you confirm the first prompt
• it installs optional urgency/report tuning if you confirm the second prompt
• it can also create the default config file if you confirm the third prompt
• scheduling happens with taskcheck --schedule
• all flags/config keys/settings are documented in REFERENCE.md

They say it's an AI

The algorithm simulates a workday one chunk at a time.

For each day starting from today, it sorts tasks by urgency and picks the most urgent task that fits the available time. It assigns a small block of work, then recomputes urgency exactly as Taskwarrior would on that day. If urgency changes, the next task choice can change too.

For today, taskcheck skips past hours.

The default work chunk is 2 hours (or less if the task is shorter); you can tune it with the Taskwarrior UDA min_block.

Before writing a schedule, taskcheck backs up the affected tasks' scheduled, completion_date, and scheduling fields under the Taskwarrior data directory. taskcheck --undo restores and consumes the newest backup. The [scheduler] option n_undos controls retention and defaults to 1; set it to 0 to disable backups.

If a task would finish after its due date, taskcheck retries with a total-urgency override. Each retry moves the task immediately above the task with the smallest greater urgency by adding urgency_epsilon (default: 0.1). At rank 1, it adds epsilon for up to max_top_urgency_rounds retries (default: 10), then tries once at urgency 1000. If the task is still late, taskcheck stops raising it and optimizes the other overdue tasks.

Tips and Tricks

• You can exclude a task from being scheduled by removing the time_map or estimated attributes.
• You can see tasks that you can execute now with the task ready report.

See the reference section above for flags, config keys, and installed Taskwarrior settings.