First look at the Excel ToDo Sheet

This is the (almost) empty Excel sheet you can download:

Here's a rough overview of the sheet:

• column A : ID a unique identifier for each entry
• column B: What a short title of the todo item
• column C: Tag a simple way of grouping related todo items (e.g. project A/B/C, phone, email, private) - for simple use cases this column can be hidden
• column D: New timestamp the item was created
• column E: Due day this item should be done or worked on
• column F: Status status of this item, mainly open or done. This column has a Conditional Formatting, so you can easily see today's items (red) or those that are still open (yellow).
• column G: Update timestamp this item was last updated. This column is automatically updated by the sheet, see another post.
• column H: Relevance indicates if this item is still relevant and should be displayed when filtered
• column I: Priority priority of the todo item - usually hidden because I don't work with priorities (similar to GTD). This is a feature I thought I would need at the start, but which turned out were not very useful and just ended up using real estate space.
• column J: Comments just a big column to let you enter any comments to the item, like stuff you've done, who you're waiting for etc.

Column H (Relevance) can have the following values:

• Old The item has been closed for more than a few days
• Future The item is open but with a due date more than a couple of days in the future
• Current All other items. This includes some closed items as well, which is great to look back on the last week and see the items you've been working on.

Based on relevance we can then use a filter to just display the items that are current. So there is no need to delete old, completed items - rather you can always go back to stuff you've done in the past and get back to your notes.

Next: Using the Excel Sheet.