At the end of each day I open the spreadsheet and click on the “due date” button. I then note the specifics of the task: name of the task, project, due date, responsible and urgency.

This automatically creates a new task and marks it with today’s date (which can be useful when looking for old tasks). I equipped it with all the functionalities that I needed and tested it every day for several months.Įvery time I have a new “to do” item in mind I go to my Excel To do list and click on “New line”. This is why I decided to implement an Excel To do list. I looked for apps/software that could automate my to do list and solve these problems, but none really suited my needs. There was a clear risk that long-lead tasks would get stuck at the end of the list and not get noticed when needed. Also, I didn’t have any tool for showing me if a task was due soon. Every afternoon I had to scan through the whole list and reorder the tasks to re-set the priorities. The text file approach was useful, but also time consuming. I find this very useful, since you get a clear picture of what you have to do as soon as you arrive at work in the morning. At the end of the day I cancelled the finished tasks and reordered the left ones depending on the priorities.

To solve this problem I started to note every task that I had to do on a text file. I find really frustrating if I have to keep everything in my mind, it feels like all my mental space is occupied by the list of things to do. This is very useful when I work on different projects at the same time and each project has a lot of different tasks. During my working day I very often find the need of writing down the tasks that I have left to do.

Best to do list template excel