Tacotecture

While we’re hard at work, here’s 4 recent tweets from happy Taco users.

@tacoapp I just submitted a suggestion, and 2 seconds later found the Trello customization I wanted already exists. You're awesome.

— Nox Dineen (@NoxDineen) December 5, 2015

Will blog someday, but the apps I use to prevent death: @tacoapp for new tab, @Wunderlist for to-do's / ideas, @Groove for customer service.

— Rob Loukotka (@FringeFocus) October 11, 2015

Just discovered @tacoapp - wow. This is such a great idea. Great job guys! #everywhereatonce

— Hamish Wyatt (@hamishwyatt) November 30, 2015

How did I just discover #Taco? #GitHub + #OmniFocus + everything else. totally awesome. my theme: http://t.co/OnSDI10jzR @tacoapp

Taco’s new How Do I... page lets new users become Taco experts in a minute:

The neatest stuff we've seen this ~week:

Beeminder's amazing introduction to akrasia and why they chose self-binding - "I will do <good X> in the future or else <bad Y> will automatically happen" - as a solution.

Getting over procrastination may not be in your genes. "Self-regulation .. explained seventy per cent of the observed procrastination behaviors"

Slate's Working podcast, which thoroughly investigates specific businesses and what their day-to-day work is really like.

We're pleased to announce that task descriptions are now editable within Taco. As you work through a multi-step task, let Taco reflect your specific next action. Here's how it works:

Why is this important?

Small, specific tasks lend themselves to focus, to flow, because the results are clear and attainable. Even when a big task is 4 or 5 tiny tasks, the smaller tasks feel achievable because they are achievable. You've thought about them enough, even if that's just 10 seconds, to clearly define the outcome.

Nick Grossman gives one example of how an open-ended task, writing, can be intimidating in Finding Flow: writing vs. coding. A task like "Write a blog post" can be abstract and correspondingly daunting. "Type my 2 main points about <topic>" or "Open text editor to write 1 sentence summary of <topic>" aren't, because the results - however modest - are defined.

Stitch a few of those modest, achievable steps together and one has a blog post.

Even with enjoyable tasks, 30 seconds of forethought, of mindfulness, can save 30 minutes of being mired. For us, these are the 2 questions which have helped us confidently focus while creating Taco:

What's most important to finish today?

What's the smallest next action I can do on it?

Towards peaceful productivity,

Taco backers, users, and fans, we're pleased to announce a significant visual improvement. Taco now:

looks stunningly gorgeous right out of the box (photo credit: Paula Vermeulen and Unsplash)

can display logos, links, and text of your choosing (using Markdown)

works far better with light backgrounds

has a simpler, more flexible settings interface

Here's the new theme with a custom logo, as seen in Taco founder Jordan Isip's task list:

In this screenshot, Jordan is also using Taco's Chrome extension to put his task list on Chrome's new tab page, and focus mode to show only the tasks (task!) he's working on now.

Why does this matter?

Taco's thesis is that spending a moment thinking about - intentionally deciding - what to do next makes a massive, outsized difference. That moment enables us us work on the most important, valuable things and to be confident and relaxed while we do.

A welcoming interface makes that moment more satisfying, and thus likely to happen more often. Given our thesis (one which I think we've now proven), Taco is unique: a more inviting interface translates directly to increased productivity and, well, happiness.

How do I use it?

Head over to Taco's improved Settings interface. You'll find most of these in "Theme."

Enjoy,

Troy, for Troy and Jordan

Here's what caught our eye (eyes..) this week:

Regarding small talk at events: "When it comes to small talk, don't think you must say something strikingly intelligent each time you speak. Your words may be forgotten, but how you make people feel will be remembered." Hate small talk?

Gina Trapani's XOXO 2014 talk about evolving and transitioning: "The work my team and I did there is some of the best of my life — and looking back, it came about because I was scared out of my mind that I was running out of time.

Focus Time. Yes, it can be a capitalized proper noun. "Tuesday and Thursday mornings at GasPedal are reserved for focus time."

The most inspiring stuff we've read or seen in the past ~week:

Without exaggerating, the most unique podcast I've ever heard as an entrepreneur: Alex Blumberg's StartUp. Alex and his prospective co-founder recorded their conversations about the negotiation, including private chats with their families.

The full story behind "The Marshmallow Test" of 4-5 year olds' self-control, as described by the principal investigator: Diane Rehm interview. He talks about how whether or not the child knows how long the adult will be gone makes no difference.

Work with startups or in a higher-risk field? I guarantee you know someone who is suffering from or managing depression (and a bit of analysis).

Taco now has an easy way to see exactly the Trello cards you want, whether or not you own the cards. We made 2 improvements:

Taco can now retrieve all active cards (rather than only those which you own), and

Taco can filter those cards by board name(s), list name(s), card label(s), and combinations

What's this for?

If you're the project manager for certain boards (so responsibility extends beyond card assignment), or work on some individual boards (so all cards are implicitly yours), or just prefer a more complete view, Taco now supports these situations. Here's specific examples. 

How do I point Taco at Trello cards I don't own?

Visit Taco's Trello connector settings. If Trello isn't active, re-link it. If Trello is active, click "Settings."

On the Settings page, check Retrieve all active cards (not only those which I'm assigned) and click "Save Settings." 

Cards in a "Done" list, archived cards, and closed boards are automatically ignored.

To filter by boards, lists, or cards, enable the option above and then return to the settings page. You'll see clickable boards, lists, and labels and we've documented some common situations.

Based on data automatically collected by employees of The Draugiem Group, take 17 minute breaks for every 52 minutes of work.

A reader improved The Economist's Worldwide Cost of Living and Liveability methodology. He added "spatial aspects of city life: urban form (sprawl, green space), the geographical situation of the city (natural assets, isolation and connectivity), cultural assets and pollution." Here's the explanation PDF, in which Hong Kong, Amsterdam,  Osaka, and Paris come out on top.

A weekly-or-thereabouts rundown of stuff that caught our eye. We'll link to primary sources when possible. If you aren't currently subscribed to Taco's RSS feed, it's here.

The journal SLEEP (yes, it exists!) reports a sweet spot: aim for 7 hours and 40 minutes of sleep per night.

Improve reading retention. My favorite: make reading active. Highlight, scrawl notes in the margins, and doodle ideas.

Forest, an iOS app to stay focused. After trying it, it's Pomodoro meets Tamagotchi.

The mistake smart people make: being in motion vs. taking action. Often "motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure."

Short walking breaks found to reverse negative effects of prolonged sitting: "participants who walked for five minutes for each hour of sitting saw their arterial function stay the same"

Hola from Mexico City, Taco fans!

Yes, yours truly is residing in Colonia Roma, Distrito Federal for the month of September (and yes, all the taco jokes absolutely do apply). Latin America's largest city is truly magical. Visit if you can.

I'm pleased to report that we've made more progress in the last 6 weeks than in any other period in Taco's history. We've made more than 50 improvements across almost every part of Taco. Here's a summary.

What's new

iOS Reminders. See and check off your iOS and OS X Reminders in Taco (without providing your password): link iCloud »

Use any Gmail label, like the inbox or your own label (screenshot). Taco now defaults to Gmail's inbox, not starred emails.

Clickable filtering. Too many tasks? No more arcane filter syntax - just click the projects and statuses you want (screenshot).

Automatic syncing. Hourly while you're using Taco, daily otherwise. Many people won't ever need to click the sync icon.

Smarter Evernote defaults. Many Evernote users enabled notes as tasks, saw too many, and didn't know how to disable or filter those. Now Taco defaults to only checkboxes as tasks (settings).

Our Chrome new tab extension now links to most-visited sites, like Chrome's new tab page does. We also helped improve Chrome's permission wording for all extensions (details).

Along the way, we fixed bugs or added smarter filtering for almost every connector. If you had a problem with Asana, Basecamp, Bitbucket, Evernote, Exchange, Google, OmniFocus, Pivotal Tracker, Remember The Milk, Todoist, Trello, or UserVoice, it's probably fixed.

What's next

Our short-term plans are:

experimenting with new methods to decide which task deserves your time right now. A list isn't the only way.

making Trello more flexible, so Taco can retrieve Trello cards which aren't assigned to you.

adding ToodleDo and Freshdesk, which were most requested after iOS Reminders (done) and Wunderlist (which we'll support when an API exists).

Make yourself at home. We're in this for the long haul and the fun is just starting.

From the home of the taco,

Dear Taco backers,

I'm thrilled to tell you about what might be Taco's crowning glory. It's absolutely the closest to Taco's vision of effortlessly knowing where you stand and that you're doing the highest-value work.

What is this magic I'm talking about? Taco can now turn Chrome's new tab page into your task list.

See and activate Taco's Chrome extension here. Click "Add to Chrome" to activate it.

This has completely changed how Jordan and I use Taco, not to mention how we work throughout the day. Give it a shot and see what you think.

A little background

2 weeks ago, I announced that Taco had implemented the 3 requests we often heard: marking tasks complete without leaving Taco, filtering tasks by project, and seeing task details. This was the biggest set of changes since Taco started.

While Jordan and I worked on those, we realized that our own biggest challenge was that using Taco required us to actively think. That sounds positive, but it's not; it took an intentional decision to visit Taco, and thus an intentional decision to stay "in the zone."

We started a side project to try to solve that problem, and I believe we have. This is peaceful productivity that's just there.

How good became great

While the basic concept of seeing and prioritizing your existing tasks on Chrome's new tab page was good, we obsessed over a few things to make the end result great:

Speed. Taco loads faster than Chrome's default new tab page, which is an accomplishment.

Privacy. The extension can only access Taco's site, not your browsing history or browsing data.

Focus-friendly collapsable sidebar. After you've chosen what to work on, hide "For Later" so you only see what's up next. New tabs retain this setting, too.

We hope we've turned what was blank space into something incredible, so after you've installed it and let it run for a few days, please let us know your experiences. And enjoy!

Jordan and I mentioned that we were neck-deep in engineering. We're thrilled to announce the largest and highest-impact set of improvements since Taco began.

As you used Taco, we received requests for 3 things far more than for any other: marking tasks complete, filtering tasks by project, and seeing additional details about a task.

Great solutions to all 3 requests are now live on tacoapp.com.

They were driven by you, and they make Taco unequivocally better; clicking Taco's new checkbox to complete a task is simply fun. Here's a rundown and screenshots.

1. Mark tasks complete within Taco

Taco can now resolve tasks with most services, like un-starring a Gmail email, closing a GitHub Issue, or checking off a Basecamp to-do complete. No need to visit the underlying service (though of course, that still works too). Just check the box and Taco will update the service:

As you can see, you decide what marking a task complete should do. The action can be different for different services. Also, if you heavily use one of the few Taco connectors which does not support completion yet, let us know so we can prioritize it.

2. Filter tasks based on project

Taco is now aware of additional details about tasks, like their Asana task list, Trello board and list, and OmniFocus context, and Taco can now filter based on these details. For example, have Taco only retrieve GitHub issues from certain repositories, or retrieve all Trello boards except two.

We've chosen the filter-able attributes to suit each service; project name and task list name are the most common. It's a more flexible way to only see the tasks you can act on:

3. Show me details about a task

Just hover over a task to see lots more about it, like status, due date, sender's email address, and project:

These only look simple now

While these changes sound straightforward now that they're done (and distilled to a sentence or two), each one represents dozens of large and small decisions to get right. We weren't interested in implementing something just to say it exists. While nothing is perfect, Taco's new solutions represent months of testing and tweaking. We're excited to see them make your day better.

Finally, you'll see lots more polish on the site, including a new text font, lots of new themes, and far better mobile support. Try visiting tacoapp.com from your phone or tablet. Yes, dragging and dropping works well now. Choose what's most important from the comfort of your couch or lunch table.

Thanks for your support. We're not done yet.

Your Taco caretakers,

Update: OmniFocus began encrypting its data, which dramatically increases the complexity of obtaining the underlying the data to the point that, coupled with the lack of an actual API, it’s practically impossible for Taco and other third-party clients to act on the data. While we wholeheartedly support Omni Group’s emphasis on security, Taco regrettably can no longer sync with OmniFocus data stores.

We're pleased to announce a completely redone OmniFocus connector, including OmniFocus 2 support and the improvements below. Using OmniFocus? Check out the results.

Improvements:

Task filtering, such as to include or exclude certain projects/folders, contexts, or only look at the OmniFocus Inbox

Project status awareness, so on-hold projects are automatically ignored

Extra information in Taco, so that seeing related information (like context or even due date) simply means hovering over the task

Tons of cleanup, including examining newly-synced OF database changes from Omni Sync Server

This also highlights a few other brand new features of Taco (filtering, extra task information) that we'll announce and highlight here soon.

All, two subtle changes today:

Cleaner mobile view. Hit https://tacoapp.com/ from your phone or tablet and see what we mean. It's not perfect (yet..) but both scrolling and dragging-and-dropping are easier. To scroll, use the empty right portion of the page, which was just made wider:

Relocated task link(s). Looking for the "Hide" button? It's shifted to the left (under the task label). No need to move the mouse halfway across the screen just to click one of these links.

So it's 9 AM and you've chosen what's most important for the next few hours. What next? Hit \ (backslash) to collapse Taco's "For later" sidebar and enter what we've started calling focus mode.

Check it out:

How it works

Looking at the upper left corner of Taco, this:

.. becomes this, where only what you've chosen is visible:

To expand the "For later" sidebar again, just hit \ again. Warning: it's actually fun to watch "For later" slide in and out.

We considered different keyboard shortcuts for this and settled on \ because it felt so natural. Of course, the arrows are clickable too. The search shortcut (/) still works with the sidebar collapsed, too.

Dear Taco backers,

Happy 2014! Jordan and I wanted to send a tiny update about what we're up to.

First off, as you've seen in these updates, Taco long ago reached the milestones that we set in our Kickstarter campaign. Actually, we blew past our goal of 20 connectors and are now approaching 40, plus a bunch of other additions.

Many of you use Taco every day, which excites the heck out of us. (If you don't, please do us the best favor any supporter can: take 30 seconds to email us with why.)

So, what are we up to? 3 things:

preparing Taco for public consumption. Web site, sign up, billion-dollar marketing campaign, that kind of stuff.

improving the setup experience for these imaginary new users we hope Taco will help

starting work on more granular connector preferences

That's also why we've been silent: all is well on this front, we're just madly hacking :-) While we're doing that, please enjoy this extra time as part of your backer reward. You took a risk on us, and we'll take any opportunity to return the favor.

We'll let you know when Taco is ready for public consumption. It won't be long.

Speaking of consumption, if you make it to Seattle (Troy) or New York City (Jordan) and want to drink or eat, please email us.

With love,