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

It's not for beginners, but it's extremely flexible once you get a handle on things. If sticking to a system is hard for you, I highly recommend giving this system a try.

There are thousands of to-do list apps out there, in part because no system works perfectly for everyone. I’m not going to say todo.txt is the exception, and that it will work for everyone, because that would be crazy. But todo.txt is the most flexible tool I’ve come across. In part, this is because of the sheer number of clients available, but also because the simplicity lends itself to improvisation.

The beauty of todo.txt is that it's completely unstructured; the fields you can attach to each task are only limited by your imagination.