Stop losing your to-do list in an email draft
Why the email-draft task list finally has to go — and what a one-line notebook replaces it with.
Plenty of thoughtful, competent people run their entire work life out of an always-open email draft. Categories with +, sub-tasks with -, a highlighter for done. It works right up until the draft vanishes, or gets ten screens long, or you can't remember what you shipped last month.
A real to-do list should do three things a draft can't: keep a permanent record of finished work, survive a browser crash, and stay readable when it grows. That's it. Everything else is decoration.
What to keep from the draft
- One line per task. If it needs a paragraph, it's a doc, not a task.
- Categories as headers. Not tags, not projects — just headers.
- A "Today" list pulled from the rest.
What to drop
- Deleting done items. Archive them instead — you'll want the record.
- Reformatting every morning. The tool should roll the day over for you.