Everdo Feature Ideas

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Please use this topic to suggest your ideas for Everdo features and improvements.
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Since I’m a heavy Everdo user myself, I will begin.

I would like to be able to filter tasks by Due Date, similarly to how it’s already possible to filter by time or energy.

For now it would be useful to be able to select one of the following filters:

  • has due date
  • due within 7 days
  • due within 30 days
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  • “Next” should display the top 1-5 actions from each project. This setting should be easily selectable within the Next view.
  • A better font for Windows. I’m on Windows 7 and the current font is razor thin and difficult to read even after enlarging it.
  • Keyboard shortcuts. Lots!. But especially for navigating up and down the left-hand pane and tasks on the right.
  • An app-level option to keep the marked-off task or project where it was before it was marked off. ie. Don’t move it into the “Done” section.
  • An option to show or hide done tasks within the project view.
  • Easier to add projects. eg. a button on the LHP to create new projects.
  • Smart lists / filters. Options for grouping and sorting, including date added or manual sort order.

A way to easily see an overview of all tasks in all projects on one screen for quick review. Perhaps an “All” entry in the LHP with grouping and sorting options. Sometimes I like to group by project. Others I like one big list sorted by date added.

This view could be built if there were sufficiently advanced smart lists.

How about “P” shortcut to add a project? It’s already there.

Could you please make an example of such smart lists/filters?

Regarding more extensive grouping/sorting options, I think it mostly falls on the wrong side of power/complexity balance. For example, sorting by date added might come useful sometimes, but it’s never really required in GTD. And It’s best to avoid unnecessary features like that.
Maybe you have a specific use case in mind where it’s required?

That works. Then I guess it comes down to discoverability. I tried shift+? and looking for hotkeys in the hamburger button menu but didn’t find anything. Looking further I now see them under “Help.”

I have thought about this this as well, but decided to not do it for now as it’s not entirely clear why the number of next actions should ever be limited if the are actions are truly “next” actions.

We have received several complaints about font contrast already. And it will be fixed. One of the difficulties here is that different OS use different fonts so it’s hard to make the same elements look good everywhere.

For now, buttons from 0 to 9 can be used to navigate between lists, for example 0 is for Inbox, 1 for Next and so on. It would be certainly be interesting if we could come up with a way to navigate the right section using the keyboard as well.

Good point, we should probably have shortcuts added to the relevant menu options/buttons for better discoverability. I mean they are kind of there already for the most part, but might be not obvious enough.

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The reason that comes up often is for greater focus and to prevent a sense of overwhelm. If my project contains 10 sequential steps, then I should only ever want to see the next step. This is huge if you have a dozen open projects, come into work, and want to throw together a list of tasks for your work day.

This brings up another point of sequential projects vs parallel projects. Omnifocus and Nirvana make this distinction. Omnifocus is the best implementation of this I’ve ever seen. Although it’s a bit complex. I’d be happy with a user-selectable number.

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OK I see your concern now.

I have seen what Nirvana does and I don’t think it very useful. No project ever is either sequential or parallel, so you end up either seeing too much actions, or not enough.

When I’m using Everdo, I treat every project as parallel.
Sometimes there are a couple of sub-actions that depend on other actions being done. In such cases I either mark them with a ‘blocked’ tag, which allows me to exclude them from the view, or move them to ‘someday’ or scheduled, whichever is more appropriate.

I definitely would like a better solution and will look more into how OF handles this. Just would like to avoid needless complexity. After all It’s a tool to get things done, not obsess over tracking every task dependency.

Thanks for your contributions!

Hi Andrei
Thanks for the recent update (v0.13.0)
I still find the display “foggy” looking. And no, it’s not my eyesite. The fonts need to POP off the screen a little more. I find my eyes get tired looking at Everdo. Other than that, I’m really enjoying your software!!

Compare to Asana:

It will keep improving. To be honest I don’t think the navigation panel is the problem anymore. You probably don’t read it a lot while using the program. Maybe other areas are giving you troubles? Could you clarify which ones?

The main difficulty is that we all have different OS and displays. On my linux laptop I wouldn’t ever think there was a contrast problem. Because the system fonts and display properties are different for each machine.

This is why I’m asking anyone concerned about this issue to give more details / screenshots

I would love to have markdown support on all task descriptions and notebooks as well as project description.

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Thought about this as well.

What’s stopping me is that it would help with / encourage note taking, while not helping or event distracting from “getting things done”. And note taking is not the focus of Everdo.

Descriptions on tasks and projects were intended to capture some quick relevant information, but they are not going to be comprehensive enough to replace more specialized tools. Or be used for content creation purposes (which is why markdown was created in the first place)

In other words, you will almost always want to use a different medium for reference materials anyway. I personally use either plain markdown files in a git folder or a google doc of some sort if collaboration is necessary. Then I just create a link to it from Everdo, so that it’s easily accessible. I could explain this setup in more detail if you’d like.

Hope this provides some justification for why it was decided to keep task descriptions simple.

A couple of questions for you:

  • what particular features of markdown would you find most useful in the context of task descriptions?
  • can you make a case demonstrating how markdown syntax would benefit your productivity (vs not having it)
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While I do agree with you to reduce as much distraction as possible to focus one getting things done, I do think that basic markdown would greatly help with task management.

For example, it would be nice if I could bold ‘Design documents’ and ‘Diagrams’
image

Or when you prepared a command to run but not exactly ready to run it now:

image

Sure these can be written in plain text… But it helps to have it formatted for readability. Especially with code snippets.

With command example above, if that were syntax highlighted, it would be easier for me to identify that this task has a piece of code or snippet among a list of other tasks.

The feature request that I’m request is not a must have, it’s just something that I think would benefit in terms UI and readability.

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Or perhaps limit the markdown to only allow basic formatting (bold, italics, point forms and snippets).
Similar to Slack’s messaging format:

Thanks for providing details!
I think support for basic formatting is reasonable and might work well without complicating things.
I will add it to the backlog as low priority.

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Got a few more feature requests :slight_smile:

  • File attachments for each task and the ability to paste images
    • This is important for todo items where you needed to upload a file or documents. Rather than finding the task on the app then having to to find the document somewhere else, it be great to be able to find the file attached to the task.
  • Full timestamp on completed tasks, the day when the task is completed is just not enough information. I need the time to shown as well.
  • Show when each task has been created and modified (Date and time)

For now, file attachments are a too big of an effort in terms of UX, design and development. You can achieve almost the same functionality by linking directly to a file on disk. It can then be opened with one click.

This should be easy enough to do, but I need to understand why :slight_smile: