TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Chris Bowler aptly describes a problem we all have—how to capture tasks:

We have various sources of useful information, but of various types, each requiring different actions.

An example may help. I could spend 10 minutes on twitter, from whatever client I use to access the stream, and come across a mention of a wallet I may want to purchase, a link to some slides I would like to peruse, and a link to a blog post that I’d like to read later. Each requires a slightly different action from me: some are tasks, some are a piece of information to reference later, and some are just curiosity.

He thinks OmniFocus is a workable solution to this, because it has good clients on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, they sync through the web (so they are always in sync), and the accompanying Safari bookmarklet works well enough for capturing these tasks.

This would certainly work, but I don’t particularly like the idea of storing tasks like Chris describes (e.g., watching a video or looking at a wallet) along with to-dos. I can’t give you a clear bright line between the two, except that “tasks” are spur of the moment and “to-dos” are planned elements of larger projects, but they are quite different and storing them together is slightly disconcerting.

Another reason for this is that “tasks” in this sense tend to be more resources than tasks. I don’t want to store that I should watch the video—I want to store the video. The two are quite different and I think it would be beneficial to build a service tailored specifically to their unique characteristics.