Tasktop to improve a knowledge worker’s productivity

I’ve been using Mylyn for quite some years now. Mylyn introduced the concept of task-focused work: activate a task in your to-do list, and only see the files relevant to that task. Tasktop, the company behind Mylyn, extends Mylyn as Tasktop, with even more features, and promises “improved productivity, guaranteed.”. It works great when I am developing software, and also could support me as knowledge worker, for instance by managing bookmarks and browser tabs in Firefox. But I’d like to see it offer more support for task management within Firefox too. A bit like this.

Mylyn and Tasktop

If you’re a developer, you probably at least had a look at Eclipse at some point. And perhaps at the Mylyn extension, to connect it to various bug trackers to populate your to-do list. It provides a standardised way of keeping track of issues in bug trackers, and helps to focus on the files relevant to a specific task. Switching from one task to another becomes lots easier, and so the cognitive overhead of managing tasks (especially finding the files associated with a task) is reduced significantly. As Mik Kersten, one of Mylyn’s masterminds, demonstrated in his PhD ¹.

Mik founded Tasktop, a company that takes the “task-focused desktop” approach even further, connecting Mylyn also to email (Outlook, Gmail, IMAP) and to the Firefox web browser.

And Mylyn and Tasktop have a lot more features, many of which I am not – or perhaps: not yet – using.

From developer to knowledge worker

These days, I hardly get to spend time on programming, but instead spend most of my time as knowledge worker. Firefox is now my predominant “desktop”, and I find myself flipping back and forth between Eclipse and Firefox quite a bit.

The people at Tasktop have been very responsive to feedback, and thereby also encouraged me to make regular contributions to their issue tracker, mostly with suggestions for improvements or new features. So I filed a suggestion to expose more of Mylyn and Tasktop in a Firefox extension.

I recently decided to try out Wireframesketcher, another Eclipse plugin, developed by Petru Severin, to sketch a bit how I think an extended TaskTop addon for Firefox might help me better.

Use case: stumbling upon a new thing for my to do list

I somehow end up on a page in my browser for a conference, event, or topic I am interested in. For instance via email, a chat, a twitter message, a phone call, a visitor in my office. I want to quickly make a new task to capture what I’m looking at.

Once I created the task or activated it, I want to perhaps add a few pages to the task context, and perhaps some notes or a copy of some text on a page. And maybe schedule it or add a due date, for instance a deadline for registration, or for submitting a proposal or a paper.

Ideally, the task context could also add downloaded files to the context.

And then I want to go back to the task I was working on, or another one on my schedule.

In summary, my wishes:

• create a new task or switch to another task within Firefox, without switching to Eclipse;

• have access to notes, task context (especially bookmarks and visited pages), and scheduled and due dates

• be able to add or remove pages that I have open to my task context.