pushpop, a mental stack manager

You're working on one problem, when another problem arises... or perhaps an interruption occurs... now you need to push the new problem on top of your mental stack, and the old problem moves down deeper into your soul. You start to solve the new problem, but remain ready to come back and solve the previous problem.

What do you do?

Turn to pushpop.

pushpop is a mental stack manager.

It lets you see the top of your mental stack.

Pop

When you've completed a task, click pop. (it makes a nice popping sound) and that task is gone.

The next item rises back to the top of the stack.

Push

But wait... you are interrupted in your quest to complete the item on top of the stack.

What do you do? You enter the new item into the textbox, and push it. Now that item is on top.

Peek

There's one more feature... peek...

Peek lets you inspect the entire mental stack. You can drag items around to reorder them. You can search for items (and can move the item you find to the top of the stack).

Finished peeking? Click peeking... to hide the stack away.

OK, OK, nerdy note... in proper 'stack' parlance, 'peek' is the operation that lets you see the item on top of the stack without popping it. Looking at the entire stack is called 'snooping' (well that's the slang term we used at university when i was kid...) But I'm using Peek here because I like the aliteration. The CLI would call it 'snoop' however.

History

While peeking, you can also view previously completed items, if you click history....

Current status

As you can see from the balsamiq mockups above, this is just in the idea phase. It's based on Next Action

CLI

There could be a command-line interface.

pushpop --peek                 # shows you what's on top
pushpop --push "debug the sql" # puts a new item on top of your mental stack
pushpop --pop                  # returns the top most item, but also removes it from the stack (and archives it?)
pushpop --snoop                # shows all items currently in the stack, from top to bottom.
pushpop --history              # shows all completed (i.e. previously popped items) including datetime of completion.
pushpop --help                 # provides help with pushpop and life in general

Implementation

I've created a repo for the project, but written no actual code as yet.

pushpop on github

Implementation is left as exercise for the reader. I suggest electron. Send me a pull request when you're done.

If the stack was stored in the cloud then you could also have iOS/android version for managing your mental stack while on the move.

Last thing

I didn't mention Yak Shaving. Why didn't I mention yak shaving? Here's a yak in need of a shave:

Yak image from wikimedia commons

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