Be productive.

To-do lists are supposed to help you get things done. And I suppose looking through all the stuff you still have to do each time you want to decide what to do next might be helpful.

More likely, though, it's just a time-consuming task that serves to stress and demotivate you while sending your brain off thinking about a n different things at once. That's how it works for me, anyway.

"Hey, me too!"

Maybe you've heard the suggestion that you paginate your to-do list--break off, say, ten things, and just look at that sub-list until it's done. Now you have a smaller to-do list. Hoorah.

Here's a better idea: divide your to-do list into two categories. One, all the thing (yes, thing) you should be working on now. Two, all the things you aren't working on now, and don't need to think/worry/wonder/whatever about until you are.

include "superpowers"

This here now.go gives you a little bit of magic. Here's how it works:

Start it up.

$ nowserve
2010/07/08 12:34:17 web.go serving :5939

When you have something you need to do later, tell it.

$ later make sure now.go actually works.
$ later write about now.go.

When you want to know what you should be doing, ask it.

$ now
make sure now.go actually works.

Let it know when you're done.

$ now -done
write about now.go.

Just add focus and consistency.

Trust it to keep track of everything for later, and you'll have all your attention for now. It's (theoretically) that easy.

No command line required!

(Note: that heading is a lie! The webpage is still half useless, since later is unaccounted for.)

GUI type, eh? Well, then, point your browser to localhost:5939 for a no-nonsense, this-is-what-you-should-be-doing-now interface. (Theoretically, a great default new-tab page!)

Speaks HTTP, too!

Are you a robot who's just not very good at multitasking?

POST /later/    thing=some+thing+to+do
GET  /now.json
POST /now       thing=go+directly+to+now
POST /done      done=

or

DELETE /now

(The format is obviously a little goofy and subject to change. The spirit will remain the same, though.)

"I don't trust it."/"I want to reorder."/"I miss that overwhelming list-full-of-stuff feeling."

With a slight admonition that "you're probably defeating the intended purpose", I point you to ~/.next.things. Verify/reorder/gaze upon to your heart's content. It's just plain text, one thing to a line. Whatever changes you make will be accomodated by now.go (just be sure to leave it alone while you're doing your manual editing).

"Okay, I want it!"

Great!

First, you'll need an installation of the Go language. If you don't have one already, it's easy enough to get one.

Once you've got Go up and running, you can goinstall now.go:

$ goinstall github.com/alloy-d/now.go

...but this just gives you the library that the tools use. To get the tools themselves installed, there are a few more steps:

$ cd $GOROOT/src/pkg/github.com/alloy-d/now.go/tools/
$ for i in *; do (cd $i; make install); done

This will install now, later, and servenow to your $GOBIN, which should already be in your $PATH.

Special notes on installation

The given method will leave the source tree intact in $GOROOT/src/pkg/github.com/alloy-d/now.go. If you don't use goinstall, you will want to make sure to keep the source around after you build the library. At the moment, it uses an ugly hack to find the static files needed for the HTML interface (see dirty-rotten-hacks.go).

Another thing to note if not using goinstall: the import in tools/nowserve/nowserve.go should be changed from github.com/alloy-d/now.go to alloy-d/now.

Miscellaneous topics

"What is this HTTP nonsense? How brain-dead are you?"

If you'd like something less bloated than an HTTP server, you can replace local now and later with these lines in your ~/.whatever-shellrc:

alias now='head -n 1 ~/.next.things'

later() {
    echo "$@" >> ~/.next.things
}

nowdone() {
    things=$(wc -l ~/.next.things)
    tail -n $(($things-1)) ~/.next.things > ~/.next.things
}

Now you can go along your merry way, blissfully unaware of my bloat, bugs, poor design, and any other harmful things contained herein.

"'Grats on reinventing the FIFO queue."

I know, I'm pretty much a champion.

Please don't nominate me for the Turing Award now, though; I have hopes that I might yet do something even better.

"Installation sucks."

I agree. goinstall is an experiment in package installation, though, and doesn't seem to consider packages that come with commands. No good solution is immediately obvious to me.