By clicking on the “Order responsible” button all the tasks are ordered depending on the person that needs to take care of them. The To do list spreadsheet comes particularly handy if I work on a project where I also have to assign tasks to other people. If more than one task is due the same day, the task with the higher urgency goes at the top. This automatically hides the tasks that have already been completed and orders by due date the tasks that are still open (the tasks that are closer to the expiry date are shown at the top). At the end of each day I open the spreadsheet and click on the “due date” button.

I then note the specifics of the task: name of the task, project, due date, responsible and urgency. This automatically creates a new task and marks it with today’s date (which can be useful when looking for old tasks). I equipped it with all the functionalities that I needed and tested it every day for several months.Įvery time I have a new “to do” item in mind I go to my Excel To do list and click on “New line”. This is why I decided to implement an Excel To do list. I looked for apps/software that could automate my to do list and solve these problems, but none really suited my needs.

There was a clear risk that long-lead tasks would get stuck at the end of the list and not get noticed when needed. Also, I didn’t have any tool for showing me if a task was due soon. Every afternoon I had to scan through the whole list and reorder the tasks to re-set the priorities. The text file approach was useful, but also time consuming. I find this very useful, since you get a clear picture of what you have to do as soon as you arrive at work in the morning. At the end of the day I cancelled the finished tasks and reordered the left ones depending on the priorities. To solve this problem I started to note every task that I had to do on a text file. I find really frustrating if I have to keep everything in my mind, it feels like all my mental space is occupied by the list of things to do. This is very useful when I work on different projects at the same time and each project has a lot of different tasks. During my working day I very often find the need of writing down the tasks that I have left to do.

Creating a to do list in excel