Wednesday, July 16th, 2025
At its heart, Perennial Task has always been about a simple philosophy: giving you total control over your tasks in a way that feels natural, powerful, and timeless. Each task is a file, you own your data, and you manage your responsibilities right from the command line where you work.
In my journey to make Perennial Task the best tool for cultivating recurring responsibilities, I’ve listened to feedback and looked for ways to make the system even more intuitive. Today, I'm thrilled to announce a major update that fundamentally refines how tasks are scheduled, making the application more flexible and powerful than ever before.
Saturday, July 12th, 2025
In the world of command-line productivity, one tool stands as a titan: Taskwarrior. It's a powerhouse of features, offering sophisticated filtering, tagging, project management, and a rich ecosystem of extensions. When I set out to build my own system, Perennial Task, I knew I wasn't creating a "Taskwarrior killer." I was building something to solve the specific workflow problems I had that Taskwarrior, for all its might, couldn't fix.
The single biggest point of friction, and the primary reason Perennial Task exists, is my philosophical disagreement with how Taskwarrior handles recurring tasks. It’s a subtle difference in logic that has a massive impact on how you manage the routine chores of life.
Friday, July 11th, 2025
I’ve tried them all. The slick, venture-backed to-do list apps with collaborative features I don’t need. The minimalist plain-text systems that are too simple. The web-based platforms that hold my data hostage in the cloud. None of them ever stuck. My needs are simple, but specific: I want a task management system that is text-based, version-controllable, and most importantly, pushes my agenda to me so I don't have to remember to check it.
Frustrated with off-the-shelf solutions, I decided to build my own. The result is Perennial Task, a simple yet powerful task manager written in PHP that runs on my personal server. It’s the backbone of my personal organization, and it ensures I never forget a bill payment, a renewal, or a simple chore.
Here’s how it works.
Thursday, July 10th, 2025
In the bustling marketplace of productivity apps, we're spoiled for choice. Sleek, cloud-based task managers with collaborative features and mobile clients are the norm. But what if the conventional approach to task management doesn't quite fit your workflow? What if you crave simplicity, control, and a system built for the long haul?
Enter Perennial Task, a command-line-based task manager that rethinks the very nature of a to-do list. By examining its inner workings, revealed through its application test suite, we can see it’s not just another app—it's a different philosophy.
Saturday, July 5th, 2025
Every developer has one: a collection of scripts, tucked away in a ~/bin directory, written for an audience of one. They’re often messy, beautifully pragmatic, and tailored perfectly to a personal workflow. My command-line task manager, which I’ve used for years, was exactly that. It was my digital garden shed, functional and familiar, but not exactly ready for guests.
Recently, I decided to clean it up for a public release. What started as a simple tidying exercise quickly evolved into a complete architectural overhaul. It was a journey of refactoring, future-proofing, and adding the polish required to turn a personal hack into a tool that others might find genuinely useful. I’m calling it Perennial Task, because like the wood lilies that reliably return to our Alberta prairies each summer, some tasks are perennial—they need to be tended to, year after year.
This is the story of that process.
Tags: software development