One of the best parts of my org-contacts setup was that when I moved a contact into a given state (followup, call, write, etc.) it’d become a task in my org agenda, along with all my other todos.

I added integrations with TaskWarrior, dstask, and Things to contacts-tui this evening:

  • Put a contact in a given state, the tasks backend creates a todo in your configured tracker with that contact’s label as a tag.

  • The task view on each contact includes tasks with their contact tag. You can close them out from within contacts-tui with a note.

This bridges the gap between contacts-tui and my todos, which is pretty important to me: If I want to be good at keeping up connections, I need the reinforcement that this is a thing as meaningful to me as any other thing I’m willing to commit to a tracker.

The connection isn’t truly bidirectional: If I close a task in contacts-tui, it’s closed in the tracker. If I close a task in the tracker, it’s still open in contacts-tui, but there’s some incentive to just close it out there: When you do, you can include a quick note about the call, email exchange, followups, etc. to keep the system up to date. (The note you enter in contacts-tui gets added to the Things note when it closes, so you keep the information both places, fwiw.)

The task backends are pretty modular and follow a simple pattern with just three calls (make, find, close), so just about any CLI task tool or scriptable tool could have a backend.

I started with TaskWarrior last night out of curiosity. I’ve never really warmed up to it but it’s sorta the big CLI task tool. I like dstask a little better and learned how to use it through a bout of insomnia last night. But cold light of day thinking told me that when I go on these CLI kicks for productivity tools they don’t usually last, so I added Things support as the realist option.

v0.5.0 has all the new stuff.