Eigenmumbles

I have kept short to-do lists on paper for forever, and in the past I’ve always had trouble when I tried to write electronic lists. Usually, I fall into the trap of writing electronic to-do lists with far too many items on them, so that it’s inconceivable that I might cross off the majority (or even a substantial minority) of the items on the list in a single day. I don’t do that with paper lists because I write more slowly than I type. But paper lists don’t automatically maintain themselves, and it’s easy forget to add dated items.

Enter Gina Trapani’s todo.txt shell script and Android application, which I have been using happily for the past couple weeks. The nice thing about this is that it’s just an ordinary text file and some shell scripts to maintain it, and so I can integrate it into a pre-exsting system of scripts and files. I keep a list of projects, ideas, etc. in an Emacs org mode file, and when I started using the todo script, I made one minor extension: a little script that goes through my projects file, pulls out dated tags, and adds them to my todo list. That way, the todo list does not get so long that I start ignoring it, but it’s constantly refreshed with things that I realized some time before that I would need to do on this day.

And now I get to cross writing here from my to-do list for today.