heidenreich do – Update: Your time at a glance, a freer rank, and moving in from your old app

There’s a new update for heidenreich do. It covers three topics, and all three have the same origin: they caught my attention while using the app in my own day-to-day life.

Time tracking: calendar view and CSV export

Tracking your time is one half of the job. The other half is the question of what happens with it afterwards – and that’s exactly where too little was going on so far.

That’s why there’s now a calendar view. Instead of a plain list, you see your tracked time where it belongs: spread across the days and weeks. One glance is enough to see where your time actually went – and on which days something might be missing.

On top of that comes the CSV export. It lets you take your time entries out of the app and bring them wherever you need them: into your invoicing, into a timesheet, into your own spreadsheet. Your data belongs to you, and you should be able to get to it whenever you want.

The global rank becomes more flexible

The rank on the tasks page decides what sits at the top – and therefore what you start with. That’s exactly why I took another close look at it.

What matters here is how your lists are displayed:

  • Lists shown at the bottom: Then the rank of your tasks is completely free. All tasks can be mixed and sorted however you like – no matter which list they come from. What’s at the top is genuinely the most important thing, across everything.
  • Lists shown “inline”: Then the rank applies within each individual list. The structure stays intact, and you prioritise right where the tasks belong.

So you decide for yourself whether you’d rather have one single, freely sortable order across everything, or whether the structure of your lists matters more to you. Both work – and both feel cleaner now than they did before.

Importing tasks and notes

The biggest hurdle when switching to a new app is rarely the app itself. It’s the thought of typing everything in all over again. That hurdle is gone now.

From the Basic plan onwards, you’ll find three ways to bring your existing tasks across under Account → Data & account → Import tasks & notes:

  • Paste text – copy & paste from any app you like: notes, email, Word or whatever you’ve been using so far.
  • Import a file – a Google Takeout ZIP containing Google Tasks and Google Keep, individual JSON files, or plain text and Markdown files (.txt, .md).
  • Connect Google Tasks – directly via Google sign-in, if it’s enabled for you.

One important point: the import only ever adds. Your existing lists and tasks stay untouched, and the new content is appended at the end. And before anything happens, the app shows you a preview (“X lists and Y tasks will be added”) that you have to confirm first. No surprises.

How to structure your text file

When importing from text or a text file, you don’t need to prepare anything complicated. The app reads perfectly ordinary text – and the more structure you give it, the more structure you get back. These rules apply:

  • One line is one task. Empty lines are skipped.
  • Indented lines (with spaces or a tab) become subtasks of the line above. A task with subtasks automatically turns into its own navigable list.
  • Headings using # create lists. Everything below ends up in that list, and a ## heading underneath a # heading becomes a sublist.
  • Bullet characters at the start of a line can stay – -, *, +, 1. and 1) are removed automatically during the import.
  • Completed tasks are marked with - [x], open ones with - [ ].
  • No structure at all works too: loose lines are collected in a new list called “Imported” – or named after the file name in the case of files.
  • Save files as UTF-8 so that special characters come through correctly. That’s the default in practically every editor anyway.

Examples make it clearest, fastest. At its simplest, it looks like this:

Milk
Bread
Eggs

That becomes a list called “Imported” with three open tasks. With a bit more structure, a lot more is possible:

# Groceries
- [x] Milk
- [ ] Bread
# Moving house
- Pack boxes
  - Basement
  - Attic
- Set up mail forwarding

This creates two lists. In “Groceries”, “Milk” is already ticked off and “Bread” is still open. In “Moving house”, “Pack boxes” turns into its own sublist containing “Basement” and “Attic”, while “Set up mail forwarding” sits alongside it as a normal task.

And if you already have an outline in mind, you can bring it straight along:

# Website project
## Design
- Decide on colour scheme
## Technology
- Sort out hosting

That gives you the list “Website project” with the two sublists “Design” and “Technology”, along with their tasks.

The same principle applies to the Google Takeout route and the direct Google Tasks connection: choose your source, check the preview, confirm. You’ll find the detailed step-by-step guide for this in the help section.

heidenreich do – just get it done!

All three new features aim at the same thing: less friction, less to keep in your head, more actually getting done. Give them a try – and if something’s missing or stands out to you, feel free to write to me at hello@heidenreich.app. A good part of what’s in heidenreich do came about exactly that way.