Tasks

A task in ontoplano is stored in one of three tables, and which one depends on a single question: does it happen again?

Everything else on this page follows from that table. A fourth thing, the occurrence, is not a task at all: it is the record of one day of one.

A recurring block

recurring_tasks. Its recurrence column says how often:

• weekly — every week on that weekday
• weeks:2 — every other week, counted from an anchor date
• days:10 — every ten days
• monthly:15 — the 15th of each month

Tuesday at 09:00, for an hour, every week is the common case, and it is a shape of the week rather than an event: a weekday, a time, and no date at all.

Editing one changes every week — past weeks included, because there is no copy of it in any of them. That is the point of it, and it is also the trap: "move the gym to Thursday" is a different act from "I went on Thursday this week", and the second must never be done by editing the block.

A one-off block

exceptional_tasks. The 4th of September at 09:00, once. The same fields as a recurring block, with a date instead of a weekday and a rule. Nothing about next week follows from it.

This is what a to-do becomes when it is given a time, and what a weekly block becomes for one day when you drag that day's occurrence somewhere else while holding Alt — the occurrence detaches into a one-off and the weekly block goes on repeating, untouched.

An occurrence

task_records. What actually happened on one day. It is the row that carries a status (todo, doing, done, skipped), when it was done, notes, and whether it was early or late.

An occurrence points at either a weekly block or a one-off block, never both. For weekly blocks they are generated ahead — one per week per block — which is what makes it possible to tick off Tuesday's gym without saying anything about next Tuesday's. Everything the tracker, the history page and the goals count is occurrences; the blocks are only their reason for existing.

Skipping one day of a recurring block does not touch the block either: it writes a suppression for that date, and the grid draws it as skipped.

A to-do

todo_tasks. A task with no time yet. It has a title, notes, a category, a notebook, three ratings — and a nullable scheduled_date.

That one nullable column is the whole distinction people trip over:

• scheduled_date is null — it is in the general list. The board's backlog, and the strip beside the planner grid.
• scheduled_date is a date — it has been pulled onto that day's board. It is on that day, but it still has no hour, so it is not on the grid.

Neither of those is a block, and neither has an occurrence. A to-do left on Monday and not finished follows you forward: the board and the planner strip both keep showing it after its day has passed, because a task you did not do has not stopped needing doing.

Priority

The three optional ratings — urgency, ease, interest — are answered on the same scale, nought to five, where five is the most of what the word says.

Ordering by Priority reads them in that order: most urgent first, then, between two equally urgent, the easier one, then the one you would rather do. An unset rating counts as 2.5 — dead centre, with three answers either side — so a task you deliberately marked 3 beats one nobody weighed, while 0, 1 and 2 are the tiers that mean "later". Two tasks answered identically come out oldest first, unless one of them has been dragged somewhere by hand.

The same comparison can be written as a single number. Writing the three answers as u, e and i:

p(u, e, i) = 1000 · (121·2u + 11·2e + 2i) ⁄ 1330

Each answer is worth more than everything below it put together, which is what makes one number behave like three read in order. The values are doubled so that 2.5 is a whole number, and the weights are powers of eleven rather than of ten because doubling leaves eleven distinct values — 0 to 10 — and a base has to be larger than the count of what it carries. With hundreds and tens, half a step of urgency is worth 50 while ease and interest can add 55 between them, and the number would contradict the order it exists to explain.

The ends are round on purpose: all fives scores 1000, all noughts 0, and a task with nothing rated at all sits at exactly 500. The figure is rounded to a whole number, so two tasks a hair apart can honestly show the same one — what never happens is a higher number sitting below a lower one.

Becoming one another

The moves that matter are the ones that change which of the four things a row is. All of them move the row rather than copying it, so the same task is never on screen twice.

Scheduling a to-do keeps what a block can hold — the name becomes the label, the notes ride on the occurrence, the category, notebook and ratings come across — and taking it back off returns the same things. What is lost going back is the date and the hour, which is exactly what was being given up.