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Octotask - Multi-source task collector and manager
Submitted by Sergey Balandin on 03.02.11
Background and Motivation:
“Getting Things Done” (GTD) is one of the most popular method of personal time management. Its main goal is to increase personal productivity by unloading all the tasks from the person's mind into an external system (GTD-system) and using a special procedure to control them. All the tasks and task-related information are initially placed into the inbox folder. Afterwards they are sorted into other folders according to the procedure.
Although the GTD-method does not require any means of automatization, there is a plenty of applications for various platforms, which declare support for it. Nevertheless, there are several aspects which are not represented in existing software, such as automatical task collection, task chains and context organization. We suppose that implementing these features in software for mobile devices may give an additional value to the method and improve overall effectiveness of GTD.
Project Summary:
The project is intended to development of GTD-style task collector and manager having the following key features:
- Location-aware contexts. In GTD a context is defined as a location and/or environment, required to get a task done (for instance, at home, at work, on the plane etc.). It is possible to have all the tasks in a mobile device and implement automatical context switching based, for example, on GPS/GSM information.
- Task collection/synchronization. Nowadays there is a lot of task sources. In GTD all of them have to be put into the inbox and manually processed to get into the system. Meanwhile, lots of tasks originated from external systems (such as bug trackers, on-line calendars and GTD services, e-mail, etc.) can be transferred to the GTD-manager application and back automatically according to predefined scenarios.
Project goals and future research directions:
<p>The goal of the project is to create an application for Maemo/MeeGo/Symbian platforms allowing flexible GTD-aware task management.</p>
List of team members and their organizations:
Yaroslavl State University
- Ilya Paramonov, senior lecturer: project leader and supervisor
- Andrey Vasilev, post-graduate student: technical and UX consultant
- Yury Krupin, 4rd year student: developer
- Denis Laure, 4rd year student: developer
- Nikita Kozhemyakin, 3rd year student: developer, tester
- Alexander Abdulloev, 5th year student: developer (in the past)
Status:
Graduate
Project Timeline and Expected Deliverables:
Jan - Feb 2011: Specification and architecture description.
Feb - Apr 2011: Development of task management core and initial integration with Tracks (web-based GTD application).
26-29 Apr 2011: Demo at 9th FRUCT conference
May - Oct 2011: Development of integration facilities and interface embellishment according to peculiarities of target platforms.
Nov 2011: Report and demo at 10th FRUCT conference.
Dec 2011 - Apr 2012: Development of context-aware facilities.
Feb 2012: Intermediate release for Ovi Store
Apr 2012: Final report at FRUCT 11th conference
June 2012: Final release for Ovi Store
Publications
- A. Vasilev, I. Paramonov, “Concept of Octotask — Multi-source Task Collector and Manager,” in Proc. 9th Conference of Open Innovations Community FRUCT and 1st Regional MeeGo Summit Russia-Finland, 2011, p. 244.
- D. Laure, Y. Krupin, A. Abdulloev et al. “Synchronization with External Task Systems in Octotask Application,” in Proc. 10th Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT and the 2nd Finnish-Russian Mobile Linux Summit, 2011,pp. 76–82.
- D. Laure, I. Paramonov, A. Vasilev, Y. Krupin, “Context-Awareness Feature in Octotask Task Manager,” in Proc. of the 11th Conference of Open Innovation Association FRUCT, pp. 192-193.
Final deadline:
Friday, June 1, 2012 (All day)
