- Dec 2019
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zapier.com zapier.com
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The beauty of using Google Sheets or another spreadsheet tool for your to do list is that you have so many formatting options. Sometimes I change the color of a cell to indicate that it's high priority. Other times I bold it. And other times I just write IMPORTANT in front of it. Whatever works. But if you like to be more consistent, you can choose colors to indicate specific things: priority, level of effort, type of tasks, or anything else you want to be able to see at a glance. For example, I always highlight a row in blue if I'm going to be out of the office. That way, I don't overschedule the week. And I highlight a row in red if it's a non-negotiable—something I have to do the day it's scheduled because of an external deadline. And because you have text formatting options—which many to do lists don't—you can make your formatting as granular as you'd like. Bold certain types of tasks, italicize others, or even add a border around cells. Whatever stands out to you visually, go with that
Free-form text formatting has its pros and its cons.
Pros: It's very flexible. Since it's free-form, you can ad hoc make any new system you want, and designate, say, bold or blue to mean whatever you want it to.
Cons: No way to enforce the rules you made for yourself. In fact, it may be hard to even remember the rules you made for yourself. You may have to create a key/legend for yourself to be safe.
This is like why I dislike software where the only way to change font is to manually choose a font. I like it better when you can define a style/class (I think Word can do this, IIRC; and obviously HTML/CSS can), choose how that class should be formatted (font, etc.) and then can style any text with that class. This is a better way to go because classes have semantic meaning. This is the same dilemma I remember facing ~10 years ago when WYM editor was fairly new: It let you select use semantic classes/elements, whereas WYSIWIG editors were the norm (probably still are) and only let you do manual free-form formatting, with no semantic meaning conveyed.
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github.com github.com
- Aug 2019