Every day, I assemble my agenda for the day from multiple sources, e.g., the Toodledo account where I keep my personal to-do list, my personal, family and work calendars, my work to-do list, personal emails, work emails, etc.
For years I’ve been doing that by aggregating all of these into a daily to-do list in Google Keep, deleting and recreating that list from scratch every morning. This was annoying because many of the items come from Toodledo, which means copying a bunch of items and checking them off in two places as they’re completed.
What I really wanted to do was to instead maintain my daily agenda in Toodledo. However, Toodledo is missing one major feature which makes that difficult: it doesn’t support fine-grained prioritization of tasks, e.g., by drag-and-drop. I don’t expect to get to everything on my agenda every day, so I need to prioritize, and it’s definitely not good enough to just complete “Top” priority tasks with today’s date in alphabetical order, which is how Toodledo presents them.
I finally got fed up enough with this that today I wrote a tool to solve it. The tool allows me to do fine-grained prioritization by arbitrarily enforcing the convention that task due times between 11pm and midnight are “fake” and can be used to persistently reorder tasks that don’t already have a due time.
The tool pulls my Toodledo tasks due on or before today, as well as today’s calendar entries, into a text file. I can edit and reorder the tasks in the text file as well as adding new texts. When I’m done editing, the tool propagates my changes back into Toodledo and uses the aforementioned 11pm-midnight hack to save the order I put them in so they show up in the correct order in Toodledo.
I don’t know if this is remotely useful to anyone else, but if it is, please leave a comment below and let me know. You can find the tool below. It has copious installation and usage instructions in it.
