The faster I run, the faster my to-do list grows, and the faster I see I must run. Every day I swat angrily at the varyingly important tasks that past me has given to present me.

The task list is in chronological order, chunked by day, using a “*” prefix to indicate complete. Had I proper foresight I tell myself, I would have at least used Markdown when I started it, where instead of a * I would have used “* [ ]” and “* [x]” to prefix each line. There are legitimate pros and cons to consider using Markdown however. In this case the most practical benefits of it are that you can denote headings with # or ## or ###, and a strike-through with ~~[item]~~ but you can also make basic tables and embed images the same way you would with html. However, that latter stuff is a little too fine-dining for a personal to-do list in my opinion, as time is really of the essence.

If you’re needing a professional looking to-do list for work or something, then the trade-offs are slightly different. Pure Markdown has some issues. First, you’ll notice that you need to put two spaces at the end of each line for a line break. That’s not very “time is of the essence” in my opinion. And then you will note that rendering Markdown requires a text editor that can do that, and I will not seriously suggest using pandoc terminal commands for a simple to do list, and for a more exaggerated form of that same reason I do not recommend reStructured text for a to-do list. So for text editing I recommend Atom  as it has quite a buffet of packages that are easy to install and allow you to do things like mix Markdown with Latex. While this can tempt you into breaking convention—and therefore portability—because of the idiosyncratic set of packages that will be needed to properly interpret your document, it is easy to imagine recovering that portability with a series of package installation calls at the start of your document like so:

apm install language-latex
apm install language-markdown
…

I should also note that QOwnNotes  has treated me well for many years as it is very specifically designed to sync with Owncloud/Nextcloud and I’m hesitant to uproot that system for something like “atom-ownsync” which doesn’t seem to get updated very often.