The problem
I've been using a lot of different apps and websites to manage every aspects of my life : tasks, projects, notes, calendar, movies to watch, books to read, habits to build, expenses to track, and more. I started by using Notion, a web app where you can write notes, have datatable, tasks, etc... but it was always slow on my devices and I felt quickly limited by its features. To be honest, it was 2 or 3 years ago, so maybe it was optimized and improved, so take my opinion with a grain of salt because it may be outdated.
Then, I tried another app : Obsidian, an application based on local markdown files focusing on Personal Knowledge Management. It was very good, the application was fast, empowered by great community plugins, so every problem I had with Notion was solved, but I faced other problems:
- files were only local, so synchronizing across devices was a real mess (until I discovered Obsidian Sync, but I still feel that 60$/year is a lot just for this feature)
- You can't centralize your data, even when using the Dataview plugin, it felt really limited. One example of this is that I wanted to be able to have every todo I wrote in one note, but it was impossible to do so without writing a lot of complex queries, and there was no sorting, no filtering, etc...
What I really wanted at the time was to have one place where I could find every running project and task. So I thought "Why not build it myself?".
The first idea
With that in mind, I created a hidden page in my portfolio (this website you are on), and a simple task manager based on the Eisenhower Matrix:
This matrix helps me prioritize my tasks based on their urgency and importance. I set a due date for each task, and the system updates the urgency every day based on how close the due date is. I could then see all my tasks intelligently sorted. Here is a screenshot of the current version:
In the metadata, you can see the importance, due date, and the estimated duration for each task. A formula calculates a score based on these values, and all tasks are sorted accordingly, so the most important and urgent tasks appear at the top. In addition, if a task's due date is in less than three days, its background turns orange.