I’m interested in ways that people document, prioritize and execute items they need to do. What have you found useful?
For me: I don’t particularly care about other Outlook functionality, but flagging emails and managing them in the sidebar has helped me a lot. I have it set to display only items due today, and then sorted into categories like “now,” “soon,” “pending.” If I don’t expect to get to an item today I change the due date to tomorrow or next week. Items don’t have to be based on an email either, you can just type into the sidebar text field.
When I get emails I either immediately reply, flag it for later action, or ignore, and then I drop all emails into one giant folder. If I need to find something I do it all by search.
I’ve tried other systems like gmail’s to do list, but it feels like way more friction to accomplish the same things, especially wanting to only view tasks due today, and categorizing tasks.
Likewise I’ve tried to-do-list apps, but not being able to instantly convert an email into a task, and not having documentation easily at hand when I go to perform the task makes them feel more burdensome.
I only wish I’d evolved it much earlier.
For most of my career, I haven’t really needed it. I was a computer programmer for ages, and there were no to-do lists, aside from natural ones that fall out from trying to get from here to there. It was moving to management that really exposed my need for a process.
todo.txt isn’t so much of a process as a data format, but it worked. The big evolution came with executive lists, which I read about on Lemmy of all places. I believe EL doesn’t really cover more than the EL itself; combining them was my innovation, although I’m certain I’m not the first to come up with it. I can’t imagine effectively doing it on paper.