This is currently a loose collection of thoughts about the problem of managing to-do lists.
The issue that I have with my current to-do workflow is this: I keep my to-do list on a piece of paper by my desk. Usually, it will hang out for about a week at a time. This piece of paper tends to get full of stuff and sometimes I even misplace1 it.
Another issue that I have is that I have a number of long term to-dos which don’t have a specific date attached to them. For example, I promise a student that I’ll re-weight their term test to the final exam. That’s definitely in the future but there is no specific day on which is must be done. It certainly won’t survive on a piece of a paper on my desk for a semester.
I tried to compile all these things in to a binder of physical paper but it didn’t quite work. The paper got filled with junk, I didn’t keep up circling things in the calendar, and I missed a bunch of deadlines.
So — A piece of paper on my desk or in a binder is not working.
A couple weeks ago, I looked at todo.txt for the zillionth time.
I started to play around with it and generally like it.
It’s a nice simple human-readable and machine-processable format.
Perhaps thinking about this will spiral out in to thinking about GTD.
All this reminds my of Jeff Huang’s piece:
And then there is the whole thing of “One Big Text File”
Listen, there is a lot of movement of paper on my desk! ↩︎
Published: Apr 23, 2025 @ 12:30.
Last Modified: Apr 24, 2025 @ 15:46.
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