I’ve gone through several iterations with my to-do list.  I usually have a pretty large list of things that need to be done either as long term goals or short term by the hour or day tasks.  I’ve found that a lot of people use plain text files to track their lists or notes,  I did this for a while but found that I really wanted hierarchical formatting to better organize my thoughts and text files don’t necessarily offer the best feature set or visual display of this type of information.  For a long time I was using OmniOutliner for this purprose but this was a bit heavy handed (feature and price wise) and not really it’s intended purpose.  Edgies is another great application for this sort of thing, and my good friend uses these, but I didn’t find that they suited me for really long lists of tasks that I may not actually get to until a year from now.

I’ve finally landed on TaskPaper, it’s my ideal tool for tracking tasks, goals, notes, and most other things.  It works like a plain text editor, but understands special formatting like a ‘-’ character to start a bullet point or a ‘:’ following a word to signify a project, as well as proper indenting to show a hierachy.  It also supports marking tasks as done, arhiving, searching, and tagging.  All very necessary features.   I do have a few complaints such as the ability to drop photos or other files.  I also find it’s not really feasible to paste a large block of code or text like an email.  Despite this however, I’ve been very satisfied and definitely recommend it.  Now I just need to actually complete some items…<sigh>