Stask

A stack to track your tasks.

May 08, 2026

To my surprise, I have a new app to announce.

Stask is a task tracking app that uses a stack to manage all manner of work items, from massive projects to tiny trifles ordinarily not worth mentioning. Unlike a to-do list, only the top item is visible at any point in time; Everything that isn’t the current task is held below. New projects, sub-tasks, and distractions are added on top of your current work and take priority. The benefit of this becomes clear once you begin marking tasks as done: Stask will show what you were working on immediately before.

This method of organizing is based on Dave Gauer’s Project Stack.

Stask has numerous advantages compared to a paper stack made of sticky notes. First—there’s no waste paper from discarding finished tasks. Second—and much more important—Stask hides the depth of its stack. This means that Stask never reminds you of what you’ve put off. This is purely an advantage; If you only see one task at a time, you can’t be hit with decision paralysis and if you don’t see the number of tasks on the stack, you can’t be struck with feelings of shame for putting off one work task for another. Being able to unwind the stack as you complete tasks lets you cleanly backtrack from distractions. Far from being a way to stop being distracted by sidequests, Stask instead prevents them from halting to your working rhythm so you can embrace blockers.

Stask began development on April 28, which at time of writing is a week and a half ago. I started using it to track my work about 90 minutes after I began to write the app—beating out Telepipe by 6 and a half hours. Since then, Stask has been instrumental in helping me finish three outstanding projects (including Stask itself). Being able to erase my existing context with a large task, shadow that one with a smaller item, and break it down piece-by-piece in the moment (rather than ahead of time) is incredibly helpful—I am constantly moving forward. It is incredibly freeing to be able to both offload my mental working context and also slowly pick it up again later without mentally overwhelming myself with

In other terms: Stask has been a game-changer.

I believe that Stask is currently feature complete. I would submit it for release on the Flathub app store were it not for the fact that I just released an app there two days ago. On the plus side, this does give me a good excuse to further test Stask, continue to develop a good working rhythm, and hopefully document best practices as well.

If you’d like to try Stask today, its source code is available on Codeberg complete with instructions for building it on a Linux computer. Included is an extended rationale for the stack-based task-management system, why it works, and why “obvious” alternatives don’t.