What is TaskPaper?

Listening to various productivity podcasts and throughout the OmniFocus UI a certain name popped up that I didn’t know anything about: TaskPaper. TaskPaper is a small macOS app that allows you to work GTD-style in a plain-text format. That format is defined here but let’s look at a small example: Let’s say, I want to work on a project called “Write a blogpost about TaskPaper” with some tasks:

1. Find out what TaskPaper is
2. Find out what’s different to something like todo.txt
3. Find out how the format is integrated in OmniFocus

In TaskPaper’s format the project would look somehow like this:

Write a blogpost about TaskPaper:
- Find out what TaskPaper is @wohnung
- Find out what's different to something like TodoTXT @wohnung
- Find out how the format is integrated in OmniFocus @wohnung

Projects are defined with lines that end with a colon, tasks below such a line are associated with the project and have to start with a dash. The example above also defines tags for the tasks. A tag is indicated by an at-sign and optionally can also have a parameter which is useful for things like due-dates or priorities:

- This has to be done by tonight @due(2019-11-14 22:00)
- This has a high priority @priority(1)

Basically, if you’ve ever seen a list in a plain-text file, you can understand TaskPaper lists.

What about todo.txt?

Another plaintext format for TODOs that has been going around for many years now is todo.txt. Here all information about a task including the project’s name is stored in the task’s line:

X Find out what TaskPaper is +"Write a blogpost about TaskPaper" @wohnung

This has the advantage that you can just parse a single line and you know everything there is about a task, including what project it is associated with. The downside is that you have tons of info-duplication which becomes annoying when you have projects with lots of tasks and just want to fix a typo in the project’s name. When I was using this system this aspect of it led me to favor short project names that left out sometimes crucial information.

TaskPaper is better here simply because you don’t have to duplicate project names. This makes those files more readable even when you don’t have any kind of tooling support. On the other hand, todo.txt allows you to associate tasks with multiple projects. I haven’t had a use-case for that so far, though. I also like the idea what tags can be parametrized so that things like priorities are not special cases:

# In TaskPaper
project:
- some task @priority(1)

# In todo.txt
(A) some task +project

TaskPaper in OmniFocus

OmniFocus starting with version 2.7 on macOS and 2.14 on iOS supports exporting single tasks or projects in a TaskPaper compatible format. All you have to do is to right-click whatever item you want to export and select “Copy as TaskPaper” to get a TaskPaper-formatted version of that item in your clipboard.

Going with the example from above, OmniFocus would export it like this:

- Write a blogpost about Taskpaper @parallel(false) @autodone(false)
	- Find out what TaskPaper is @parallel(false) @autodone(false) @context(Wohnung) @tags(Wohnung) @due(2019-11-14 22:00)
	- Find out what’s different to something like todo.txt @parallel(false) @autodone(false) @context(Wohnung) @tags(Wohnung)
	- Find out how the format is integrated in OmniFocus @parallel(false) @autodone(false) @context(Wohnung) @tags(Wohnung)

OmniFocus, for some reason, exports the project not as project but as a nested tasklist. A bit unexpected but that shouldn’t be a big issue when integrating it into your workflow.

Importing works in a similar way: Just put a TaskPaper-formatted list into your clipboard and click CMD+V inside OmniFocus. The new projects and tasks should appear in your inbox.