Managing Your Tasks with Errands

For the last year or so, I’ve been using a paper notebook and a pencil to manage my tasks. Recently, though, I decided to try going digital again. While I settled on using Todo.txt, mainly because it’s simple and uses plain text, I did test drive a few desktop todo list applications as well.

They all had their good points, but none were quite right for me. One that I liked more than a bit with was Errands. It’s a relatively simple, but effective, task management app for the GNOME desktop. Let’s jump in to it.

Getting Errands

You’ve probably heard me say this before: check your Linux distribution’s software centre — you should be able to install Errands from there. If not, or if you just want to do the deed another way, install it from Flathub.

Installation doesn’t take very long. Before you know it, Errands will be ready to run.

Getting Started

When you first fire up Errands, you see this window:

To get going, click Create List (which lets you group tasks by type — for example, Blogging or Side Gig). This is something I find a bit annoying, not just with Errands but with a few other task management tools as well. To be honest, I don’t group my tasks. Creating a list should be optional. But when using Errands and all that …

In the dialog box that displays, enter a name for your task list and then click Add. Rinse and repeat for each list that you need. Just so you can see what it looks like, here are some task lists in Errands:

In case you’re wondering, Errands assigns each task list a colour. I couldn’t find a way to change those colours.

From there, you can add a task by clicking on a list, typing something meaningful in the Add new Task field, and then pressing Enter. Here are some tasks in Errands:

See that little icon to the right of each task? Click that to add any or all of these to the task:

• A due date.
• A note about the task.
• A priority.
• A tag.
• An attachment.

Here’s what that looks like:

You’ll need to click the icons to get details of each item after you add them.

When you’ve completed a task, click the circle beside the task’s name.

It’s easy to add a task to the wrong list. To get around that in Errands, you can drag and drop tasks to move them between lists.

Syncing Tasks

If you want to share your tasks across more than one device, Errands can help. At least, to a point. You can sync your tasks with the Tasks app in Nextcloud (an open source file syncing/sharing/collaboration tool) or to a server using something called CalDAV.

To set up syncing, click the stacker menu, click Preferences, and then click the Sync tab. You’ll see this window:

Select either CalDAV or Nextcloud from the dropdown list. Then enter this information:

• Server URL
• Username
• Password

After that, click Test. If all goes well, you’ll connect to the server.

From there, close the window, click the stacker menu, and choose Sync / Fetch Tasks.

I didn’t try hooking Errands into a server using CalDAV, but I did try it with Nextcloud. The results were .. well, a bit surprising. When I synced the two, Errands didn’t pull my existing tasks down from Nextcloud. Errands pulled down task lists from Nextcloud (even though they had the same names as the ones in Errands) and showed the number of tasks in each list. When I clicked a list, it was empty. But my task lists and the tasks from Errands were uploaded to Nextcloud. So, if you’re planning on using the two together, create your lists in Errands first. Then, sync to an empty Tasks app in Nextcloud.

Preferences in Errands

There’s not a lot you can do to customize Errands. If you want to try fiddling with the settings, click the stacker menu and then click Preferences. You’ll see this window:

You can change:

• The application’s theme.
• The way in which Errands sorts tasks in a list.
• Whether or not:
  • It sends notifications to your desktop when a task is due.
  • The application window is hidden instead of closing it.
  • To start Errands when you log into your desktop.

For the most part, you can stick with the defaults.

Final Thoughts

To be honest, I like Errands. It has most of what I want in a desktop task management application. However, there are two drawbacks for me. The first is having to create at least one task list. Sure, I can create a catch-all one, but why should I do even that? My preference is for a more free-form list.

The second drawback is that it stores tasks in a single JSON file. I’d prefer my tasks to be in a plain text file with a format that’s more easily readable. Which is one of the reasons I went back to using Todo.txt.

If you need a simple task management application, give Errands a look. It might not pack all of the features that similar applications do, but it’s light and quick. For most of us, Errands is all we really need.

— Scott Nesbitt