Here’s how that might look: Feed iguana +Personal Ask doctor about ticks +Personal elephant touchscreen post +HowToGeek Research laptop prices +Personal Clean the damn kitchen +Personal +Cleaning looks a bit busy, sure, but most clients help reduce the noise by colorizing the tags and priorities. Obviously, you can combine priorities, projects, and contexts for tasks. This is done with the symbol, like this: Feed iguana doctor about ticks elephant touchscreen post laptop prices the damn kitchen +Personal Combining All These Elements You can add one or more Contexts to your tasks, allowing you to quickly see which tasks need to happen where. There are some you’ll need to handle while in your office, some while at your computer, some while at home, at so on. In the task world, context means tracking where (and sometimes when) you need to take care of a task. Write elephant touchscreen post +HowToGeekĬlean the damn kitchen +Personal +Cleaning Adding Context to a Task
MICROSOFT TODO MAC APP PLUS
Projects are marked with the plus sign followed by a word, like this: Feed iguana +Personal You can also define any task as part of one or more Projects, which is useful because you can filter your list by project later. But even if you just use a text editor instead of a client app, it’s still easy to scan your list and see your most important tasks. It’s very useful for setting the pace of your workday. Most todo.txt clients sort your tasks by priority, so don’t overlook this feature. Let’s start with priorities: simply put a capital letter in parenthesis at the beginning of the line. Every task takes up one line in a document named “todo.txt.” Like this: Feed iguana A Simple Text DocumentĮvery computer and smartphone on earth can open text documents, and you don’t need anything but a text editor to start using the system. It’s flexible in precisely the way so many modern apps aren’t, and if you like tweaking things until they’re just right, I can’t recommend it enough. And if all else fails, you can just use a text editor. Originally a command line tool, a community has grown around todo.txt, offering great GUI clients for every platform you can imagine. Todo.txt is a system for managing to-do lists originally created by Lifehacker founder Gina Tripani way back in 2006. Not only is using a text document simple and flexible, but you future proof yourself against that inevitable day when your favorite to-do app gets shut down. Which is why I advocate ditching them all and using a text document. That’s a lot of nonsense to deal with, and we haven’t even gotten into the subscription upselling most to-do apps on the market try to pull for what is basically a text document.
And it gets worse: Microsoft bought Wunderlist in 2015, and plans on eventually shutting it down in favor of Microsoft To-Do, a new-ish app that as of this writing isn’t even available for Mac. Wunderlist, for example, takes up 127 MB of hard disk space on macOS, even though the app is basically a wrapper for a website. And yet most modern to-do apps are bloated nightmares. To-do lists don’t have to be complicated: people literally use pen and paper to keep track of their tasks. I honestly wonder why I ever used anything else. Todo.txt stores your tasks in a simple text document, and I’ve been using it for a year now.