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Quick Start Guide

Get up and running with Taskott in a few minutes. This guide walks you through setting up your goals, understanding tasks, and starting your first sprint.

1. Get Taskott

Taskott is distributed through a private GitHub repository. Once you have access, download the latest release for your platform and install it.

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Don't have access yet? Request access on GitHub. No account is required to start using Taskott locally — you can create one later for cloud sync across devices.

2. Connect Google Calendar

Google Calendar is the essential integration for Taskott. It powers several core features:

  • Time attribution — Attribute calendar events to your goals for accurate time tracking
  • Calendar review — Review and categorize past events with smart auto-categorization
  • Dailies — Surface your calendar context during daily planning

Go to Settings → Integrations → Google Calendar and sign in with your Google account. See the full setup guide for details on categorizing calendars.

3. Create your goals

Goals are the top-level categories that organize all your work. They're color-coded and have priority levels.

  1. Navigate to the Goals screen

    Click Goals in the sidebar navigation.

  2. Create 2-4 goals

    Start with a few high-level categories. Examples:

    • Career (P1) — Your primary professional work
    • Side Project (P2) — A personal project you're building
    • Health (P2) — Exercise, meal prep, wellness tasks
    • Learning (P3) — Reading, courses, skill development

  3. Assign colors and priorities

    Each goal gets a color (for visual identification) and a priority level: P1 (critical), P2 (important), or P3 (nice-to-have). Priority helps you make trade-offs during sprint planning.

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You can add more goals later, but resist the urge to create too many upfront. 3-5 goals is the sweet spot for most people.

4. Add your first tasks

Navigate to the Tasks screen and start adding tasks. Each task needs:

Field What it means Example
Title What you need to do "Write blog post about sprint planning"
Goal Which goal this serves Side Project
Effort Estimated minutes to complete 60
Value How important this is (your own scale) 8
Week Which week to schedule it for This week / Next week / Backlog
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Effort is in minutes and should reflect your honest estimate of how long the task takes. Value is a number you assign based on how important the task is — there's no "correct" scale. Just be consistent. Higher value = more important to you.

Task groups

If you have several related tasks you'll execute back-to-back, create a Group. Groups bundle tasks together so you can work through them sequentially in execution mode without context switching.

Recurring tasks

Tasks that repeat (weekly standup prep, gym sessions, weekly reviews) can be set to recur daily, weekly, monthly, or on a custom pattern. The next instance auto-generates when you complete or skip the current one.

5. Start your first sprint

When you have tasks scheduled for the current week:

  1. Go to the Home screen
  2. You'll see a prompt to start your weekly sprint
  3. Review the tasks committed for this week
  4. Click Start Sprint
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Once a sprint starts, you cannot add new tasks to the current week. This is by design. The constraint forces you to plan upfront and protects your focus during the week. If something urgent comes up, you can pull tasks from next week using the "Pull from Next Week" feature.

You're now ready to execute. Head to the Sprint System page to learn the full weekly rhythm, or jump into Execution Mode to start working on your first task.

What's next?

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