Abstract: Application task management (“ATM”) methods may employ a task list stored in a file on a nonvolatile information storage medium. Parallel processing instances employ an application programming interface (“API”) that enables each processing instance to individually access the task list. The access protocol enforced by the API is sufficient to provide robust, fault-tolerant behavior without requiring a specific process or daemon to be responsible for ATM. The API may employ a locking mechanism based on universal or widely-available operating system calls (such as directory creation) that implicitly or explicitly guarantee atomic operations. Each processing instance performs a check-out of unfinished tasks with a request that includes a timeout value, transforms the unfinished tasks into finished tasks, and provides a check-in of the finished tasks, and repeats. This approach supports the use of a variety of models through the use of chained or nested task lists, and it can be readily scaled.