Make Tasks a better experience

[snsokstan 34]

User since EN started in 2008

I've tried over and over to use EN as my task manager and failed each time.

It needs:

• more real estate. The fly-out panel in EN for Mac is too confining. Give us the rest of the screen if we want it.
• Tasks need categories like home, work, hobbies, travel or whatever we want.  It's not a heavy lift: just add the ability to assign a task to a category as well as a contact.  Easy!
• The ability to sort tasks by name, date due, whatever we want when in Assigned or Due Dates tab
• Levels of priorities are more than just a flag. I'm using red, yellow and green symbols as the first character of a task now so I can visually see priority  ( 🟥 high, 🟨 medium 🟩 low). Kludging an expensive subscription program shouldn't be necessary

I hate having to use another app for tasks. I've been using Apple Reminders, which has way more functionality until EN gets more useful. I would love the linking between notes and tasks. Right now, I capitalize on the excellent search in both EN and Apple Reminders by using my own zettelkasten method here.

Thanks, Bending Spoons. I'll renew at the new higher cost if tasks can finally be useful in EN.

[Mike P 2,646]

58 minutes ago, snsokstan said:

I've tried over and over to use EN as my task manager and failed each time.

I think Tasks is one of those projects in EN that got 80-90% of the way there, but they never put the effort in to finish. Therefore it is useable, but lacks the finesse of a mature task management program like Todoist. I think "make tasks a better experience", captures it perfectly for me too. I also use coloured emojis and that's great for visual appeal and searching, but it get's clunky if you want to use them for more than one category, although with discipline it can be done.

The features I would particularly like are:

• Highlighting for tasks due today - like the highlighting for overdue tasks
• The ability to hide a note link and weblink behind text within a task rather than have the very long evernote://.... etc link
• Tasks in tables
• Traceability of when tasks were completed
• Ability to save task filters as a shortcut. Filtering to find all the tasks due today should be just one button not a complex operation
• The ability to apply a task filter to the tasks widget in Home (and in Android). Why on earth would I want a random selection of tasks on my Home page?

I am currently moving over from Todoist to EN having only dabbled in the past. I think the ability to seamlessly integrate tasks with notes is brilliant, so I'm putting up with the frustrations (and a few bugs) for the moment. 

[AlbertR 538]

6 hours ago, Grant837 said:

Wonderful thread... Evernote Tasks is indeed, at best 80%, done.

Here's how I organize my tasks since years

• completely without a further task management tool...
• based on Legacy (sorry for that - but see my footer)
• ... but covers all the features many people are missing with EN10 Tasks 😉

 

Definitions (nothing to do here except remembering it)

• A task is a note with a reminder time and no reminder done (time)
• Subject is given by the note's title
• Description is given by the note's text
• Project assignment is given by the note's location (notebook) or tags like "!<project-name>"
• Priority is given by reminder time and tags like ">1-high", ">2-normal", ">3-low", ">8-waiting"
• Lists are defined by Saved searches and Shortcuts (Favorites)

 

Preliminary work (that's all 😉)

• Create notebooks and tags for projects
• Create Saved Searches like the following, configure result list columns and set flag "Remember View Settings"
  • 🛠 - all:                                reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:*                                 tag:>*
  • 🛠 - overdue:                       reminderTime:* -reminderTime:day+1 -reminderDoneTime:*
  • 🛠 - next 2 days:                  reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* -reminderTime:day+3 tag:>* 
  • 🛠 - worked on last 2 days: updated:day-2
  • Add these Saved searches to Shortcuts
• Edit Style...  of your project notebooks and add them to Shortcuts
• Edit Style...  of your priority tags and add them to Shortcuts
• Sort Shortcuts as you like by moving lines up and down with left mouse button down...
• At the end you will see the following Shortcuts list:
  • 

 

Workflow (isn't it easy?)

• To list your tasks
  • simply click on Shortcuts lines
  • shrink down huge lists by Ctrl-Click on Shortcuts lines
  • find specific tasks by typing search words and|or phrases to search input box in note list
• To modify your tasks
  • comment your tasks in note text
  • modify reminder times and done times of notes depending on task progress
  • modify priority tags of notes as necessary
• To add new tasks
  • add a note in a project notebook and assign it a reminder time (and optionally a priority tag)
• To mark a task as done
  • Mark reminder As Done.

[snsokstan 34]

For all they are doing to improve the app, you would think they could fix Tasks.

[Mike P 2,646]

5 minutes ago, Fixestcat said:

It feels like Evernote stopped the development while having completed 98% of the work already.

Seems like you are being a bit more generous than me!

On 8/13/2023 at 7:17 PM, Mike P said:

I think Tasks is one of those projects in EN that got 80-90% of the way there, but they never put the effort in to finish.

I definitely like tasks and have found ways around most of the limitations. I'm probably currently more concerned by randomly occuring bugs than the limitation in functionality.

[snsokstan 34]

Have you experimented with the AI-powered search functionality as a workaround for searches with complex grammar?  

It was able to find a task I just created that was due today and mentioned a specific person. It actually found the "Things to do" note that s holds tasks not in another specific note.

"Find all tasks mentioning Roger that are due today"

If this could work, such searches could be applied quickly using  text replacement shortcuts. 

Anyone else using AI powered search for task management?

 

[snsokstan 34]

All good suggestions, @MikeP

In a word, EN's task panel is just cluttered.  I need something I can glance at. I put the thought into priorities when I add tasks. I don't need rethink each time I look at the task list.

Quote

Why on earth would I want a random selection of tasks on my Home page?

And there's that also. The Home page has so much potential.  Ironically, the view of tasks in the fully expanded Home page widget is so much cleaner than the actual task panel. Pretty but pretty useless.

[Jon/t 1,303]

I'd love to see tasks expanded on. Custom views, kanban etc. 

Also love to see custom home screens one day. Imagine a home for each project with its own tasks, notes and events!

[Mike P 2,646]

46 minutes ago, snsokstan said:

The Home page has so much potential.

The Home page is another one of those things where they got 80-90% of the way there, but never put the effort in to finish!

[s2sailor 2,216]

5 hours ago, Mike P said:

I am currently moving over from Todoist to EN having only dabbled in the past. I think the ability to seamlessly integrate tasks with notes is brilliant, so I'm putting up with the frustrations (and a few bugs) for the moment.

I moved over from Todoist about a year ago and don't mind saving that subscription.  For me, using tasks in Evernote required a change in my thought process.  Once I was onboard with that I found tasks useable enough for me to move over, but as you mention, the potential is not fully there.  Evernote has opportunities for greatness but never quite gets to the finish line.

[snsokstan 34]

On 8/13/2023 at 2:22 PM, Jon/t said:

Also love to see custom home screens one day. Imagine a home for each project with its own tasks, notes and events!

@Jon/t That would be nice.  I recently changed from the few-notebooks-many-tags strategy to creating a separate notebook* for projects, all nested under a stack called "1PROJECTS" so it's at the top of my Notebooks list. Each project has an event log and notes. I'd love to use EN's own task function there if it weren't so limited.

 

*This is using Tiago Forte's "PARA method which I find transformative.

[Grant837 112]

Wonderful thread... Evernote Tasks is indeed, at best 80%, done.

- Tags.  I would love to be able to tag my tasks.  That way I could associate a tag with a project or a type of action or the place I am at.  It would be so handy.

And second I would like saved Task Searches

And for it to also show the Notebook its in in the 'My Tasks'  view and not just the other three (I find that really odd... need to ask if its a bug)

(and of course, I wish Tasks pane worked at all on my pre-release version of Windows 11 - lets see how that works how when the public release comes out....)

[RJLUK 307]

If you have time would you mind explaining what's meant by:

• 🛠 - all:                                reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:*                                 tag:>*

Please.

 

This is really useful and if EN stabilises , in the absence of EN improving tasks, this is good working fix

[AlbertR 538]

              reminderTime:*                            -reminderDoneTime:*       tag:>*
means: All notes with reminder time     but not done                       and any priority tag
All my priority tags start with a ">"-Character whereas "*" is a wildcard 

Unfortunately EN10 has following problems with this methodology:

• Some of the search phrases (including "🛠 - all") simply fail (will return 0 notes)
• Shrink down list by Ctrl-Click on Shortcuts is not implemented
• Workbook and Tag styles (colors, bold a.s.o) are missing
• "Remember View Settings" is missing
• "Edit Saved Search query string" is missing

For me neither EN10 nor its task features are usable to handle my ToDos ☹

My concerns on EN10 tasks are...

• Tagging is impossible
  • This is unbelievable for Evernote - biggest feature at all - completely forgotten 😡
• Lists are not integrated (or are at least not comparable) to normal note lists
  • This make is un-handy and complicated to manage 😢
• Task features feel to be developed by a team that's outside EN core
  • If so, it will have no future in EN 🤔

[Patricius 6]

I don't think tagging is impossible in EN tasks. I put the 🏷️ symbol in front of words that are meaningful tags. [On Windows, Win key + period will fetch the emoji lists, and you can search for "tag"]  So I "tag" certain of  my tasks by putting the 🏷️before ... 🏷️Book_Club  🏷️Next_task  🏷️In-process  🏷️Friends_networks  🏷️Finances  🏷️Freelance   🏷️Productivity  🏷️Waiting  🏷️Aging  🏷️Notion. You get the idea? So to search for tasks that are next in line, or connected with Friends or the Book Club, it's easy. Put the tag symbol 🏷️ in front of the meaningful places you wish to find. ... As well, I found the most used tags in my Evernote and can connect them to the task list. E.g. My tag, "Read_often" finds me a large number of very inspiring notes in Evernote. I made a note titled "Read-often", and placed the "Read_often" tag at the bottom. Now I've made a task "Read through your Read_often notes" before which I place  "🏷️Read_often" and ask that I'm shown this task every week. So every week my task finds the "Read_often" note I made, then I click on the down arrow of the tag at the bottom, find the hits corresponding to read_often and read happily away.  Have I made sense? In short, I agree with the consensus emerging on this page: EN task feature IS worth nudging to greater functionality! A lot of hard thinking has given us this gift: let's make it better.

[snsokstan 34]

20 minutes ago, Patricius said:

I don't think tagging is impossible in EN tasks. I put the 🏷️ symbol in front of words that are meaningful tags. [On Windows, Win key + period will fetch the emoji lists, and you can search for "tag"]  So I "tag" certain of  my tasks by putting the 🏷️before ... 🏷️Book_Club  🏷️Next_task  🏷️In-process  🏷️Friends_networks  🏷️Finances  🏷️Freelance   🏷️Productivity  🏷️Waiting  🏷️Aging  🏷️Notion. You get the idea? So to search for tasks that are next in line, or connected with Friends or the Book Club, it's easy. Put the tag symbol 🏷️ in front of the meaningful places you wish to find. ... As well, I found the most used tags in my Evernote and can connect them to the task list. E.g. My tag, "Read_often" finds me a large number of very inspiring notes in Evernote. I made a note titled "Read-often", and placed the "Read_often" tag at the bottom. Now I've made a task "Read through your Read_often notes" before which I place  "🏷️Read_often" and ask that I'm shown this task every week. So every week my task finds the "Read_often" note I made, then I click on the down arrow of the tag at the bottom, find the hits corresponding to read_often and read happily away.  Have I made sense? In short, I agree with the consensus emerging on this page: EN task feature IS worth nudging to greater functionality! A lot of hard thinking has given us this gift: let's make it better.

Very creative: tagging with a tag emoji! @Patricius

🏷️That's also available in MacOS.

[Mike P 2,646]

51 minutes ago, Patricius said:

I don't think tagging is impossible in EN tasks. I put the 🏷️ symbol in front of words that are meaningful tags

I also use emojis as tags in tasks. It's a good work around. The problem comes when you want to use more than one tag. It works provided you are very disciplined - e.g list all your tags in alphabetical order. Remember a search for "🔴tag1 🔴tag2" would be different from a search for "🔴tag2 🔴tag1". I also use autohotkey (on windows) to speed up the addition of key emojis by typing simple "hotstrings". 

[Patricius 6]

Thanks for the comments. I will learn to use the hotstrings that Mike P laid out for us. Another thing is there is a work-around to get some rudimentary SUBTASKS added to the task text. Go back to the emoji tables [Win + .], search for "square", tap on the "⬜" emoji. Then search for "check mark", tap on the "✔️" emoji. Now you can make a task like the following:   

"Prepare for Sept 11 poetry mtg:  ✔️Do summary  ✔️Check history for next presenters  ◽Contact Nicholas to send his address to the other members  ◽Email whole group".  

 

[RJLUK 307]

On 8/20/2023 at 1:48 PM, RobertJLee said:

If you have time would you mind explaining what's meant by:

• 🛠 - all:                                reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:*                                 tag:>*

Please.

 

This is really useful and if EN stabilises , in the absence of EN improving tasks, this is good working fix

Never got an answer on this anyone know how this is done?

 

[PinkElephant 8,143]

Remindertime:*

means all reminders with a time set, * is the wildcard

-reminderdonetime:*

means skip all reminders with a set done time 

Together this produces all reminders with a set time stamp, skipping all reminders with a „Done“ time stamp = all open reminders.

The difficult thing is the 

tag:>*

What is meant All tags that start with the character „>“ plus any additional text (again the wildcard * ).

The problem is that EN does not put interpunctation into the search index. So likely „>*“ is the same as „*“, and will simply find all tagged notes, not only those with tags starting with the character > .

Was this your question ?

[RJLUK 307]

Yes thanks a lot

 

[AlbertR 538]

11 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

The problem is that EN does not put interpunctation into the search index. So likely „>*“ is the same as „*“, and will simply find all tagged notes, not only those with tags starting with the character > .

No. Unfortunately EN10 has a problem with "tag:>*" - it leads to "nothing found" whereas "tag:=*" cleary finds all notes that are tagged with any tag whose name starts with "=".

I logged this problem to support with the following example:

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:*                             works fine (no “tag:…”,  returns 308 notes)

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* tag:>8-waiting   works fine (no wildcard, returns 91 notes)

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* tag:>*                  fails (“>” and “*”, returns 0 notes in EN10 but 226 in Legacy)

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* tag:=*                  works fine (“=” and “*”, returns 182 notes)

 

They were able reproduce the problem and excalated it to technical (next level) support.

 

[Mike P 2,646]

Unfortunately, you just need to learn from expereince which special characters will work. I use $ and + with no problems. Some emojis also work. So 

tag:📌*

finds all the tags starting with 📌 

[Marcin Jak 2]

5 hours ago, AlbertR said:

No. Unfortunately EN10 has a problem with "tag:>*" - it leads to "nothing found" whereas "tag:=*" cleary finds all notes that are tagged with any tag whose name starts with "=".

I logged this problem to support with the following example:

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:*                             works fine (no “tag:…”,  returns 308 notes)

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* tag:>8-waiting   works fine (no wildcard, returns 91 notes)

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* tag:>*                  fails (“>” and “*”, returns 0 notes in EN10 but 226 in Legacy)

reminderTime:* -reminderDoneTime:* tag:=*                  works fine (“=” and “*”, returns 182 notes)

 

They were able reproduce the problem and excalated it to technical (next level) support.

 

I have modified the search to 

(reminderTime:* -reminderTime:day+1 -reminderDoneTime:*) AND tag:@Office* 

and it works perfect on Evernote 10 for me

[AlbertR 538]

Yep - nearly all(?) characters work fine except ">". So my workaround might be to change all my >*-tags to any other. Hope my fingers are able to learn new typing sequences 😉

"nearly all(?)" means that I've checked other special characters of my workflow (=_@~:#.): OK
Only (><$) do have problems...

[Fixestcat 10]

If EN would simply copy TickTick, I think at least 80% of the people would be happy about the task functionality

[Grant837 112]

On 9/1/2023 at 3:53 PM, AlbertR said:

Yep - nearly all(?) characters work fine except ">". So my workaround might be to change all my >*-tags to any other. Hope my fingers are able to learn new typing sequences 😉

"nearly all(?)" means that I've checked other special characters of my workflow (=_@~:#.): OK
Only (><$) do have problems...

What is annoying is that the opposite is true for searching for special characters in the normal text.  It will not recognize the special charater and give results for the text after the special character.  For example, !Home will find all notes with the word Home in them.  Sigh.

Searching for emojis, on the other hand works, but I tried that route, and it was just too much work... I would rather work with normal functionality.

[AlbertR 538]

1 hour ago, Grant837 said:

!Home will find all notes with the word Home in them.

Yep - but this is true since ever (not a problem of EN10). Normal search ignores all special characters with one exception: Underline ("_") is recognizes. I use this within text to emphasize names (i.E. "_Jim" instead of "Jim") to clearly find the name Jim (if I search for "_Jim") 😉

[Fixestcat 10]

It seems like development and investing in task has stalled for months now, leading to users to revert back to dedicated task managers, although the integrated tasks functionality of Evernote is superior in my opinion. It feels like Evernote stopped the development while having completed 98% of the work already. Frustrating, still I subscribed for another year... If it was not for tasks I would have left Evernote this year, because ratio of value to price would not have been justified in my opinion.

[Fixestcat 10]

3 hours ago, Mike P said:

Seems like you are being a bit more generous than me!

I definitely like tasks and have found ways around most of the limitations. I'm probably currently more concerned by randomly occuring bugs than the limitation in functionality.

Bugs with tasks I encounter rarely, I use an Android, iPadOS and MacOS.