.txt file makes a simple, elegant to-do solution

Productivity is big business, and it seems a bewildering number of the folks online have a system they wish to sell or promote. Whole websites and blogs devote themselves to teaching people how to squeeze more productivity out of a day that still has just 24 hours in it.

But it's so eaxy to get caught up in processes and systems that you forget the whole reason behind them, which is to get stuff done.

And many of these systems seem to be as complex as astrophysics. I've read about phased sleep and pomodoros, about multi-pigeonhole systems like Getting Things Done (GTD), and a handful of others. And many of these systems seem a whole lot more complicated than they should be.

The dirty little secret about productivity is that there are no secrets. Not really, anyway. And despite what the systems-peddlers try to tell you, none of this is exactly brain surgery. To be productive, you really don't need much more than a schedule and a to-do list.

Despite the cool databases and special programs out there that promise to manage even those things, you really don't need fancy software. Any word processor or text editor will do it -- even the beyond-ugly, who-knows-why-it's-there Notepad function on your Windows computer.

Productivity doesn't get much simpler than this: One file, not much more than a kilobyte in size. The trick is to use it and to make it accessible. For brevity's sake, let's call this file something simple: todo.txt is fine.

For your todo.txt file, all you'll need is the text. You won't be formatting it. You'll be reading it online, or on your cell phone, so we're keeping it simple.

However you format it is up to you -- it's your todo.txt file -- but I use an outline-style layout. Maybe I'll have Monday's agenda laid out:

MONDAY 31 FEB 2011

GOALS:

1. LIVE THROUGH IT
2. WRITE SOME GOOD STUFF

A.M.

1. Hold mirror under my nose & make sure it fogs
2. Get out of bed ...

Or something. But you get the idea.

In the computing world, text files are universal. Just about anything on your hard disk -- including the heavy program files -- can be edited in a text editor even if it's not easy to read.

Even this article started life as a text file. I used the Vi text editor to write it, and I don't use word processors very often. The output of the file is nothing more than the words I wrote; a word processor will introduce all sorts of "garbage characters" that won't help readability but include all the format commands. But since very little of my work finds its way to a printer, I don't have any real use for all these extra format characters. Better to simplify the whole thing in a .txt file than to go with a .doc file.

Text files take up less space and bandwidth, and only a shortfall of imagination limits what I can do with a .txt file. Building an agenda in such a manner is beautiful in its simplicity.

To quickly open the file, make a shortcut to the desktop. You can then name the shortcut anything you want, and give it an icon that catches your eye. Double-clicking on the icon will bring up your agenda.

But that's not all. If you have a cloud-based storage service like Dropbox, you can edit your agenda from all your computers that have online access, To do this, save your file to your Dropbox public directory. Then go to the online Dropbox interface, log in, and go to your public directory. From there you can grab the link to your file. Hang on to that link and uyse it to view your agenda through the browser on any computer or Web-enabled phone.

While todo.txt is handy and and a handy way to keep your schedule and to-do lists, that's just a start. You can build the following files in the same way:

• A list of phone numbers. Some text editors have a sort feature, which means you can alphabetize the list with just a couple of mouse clicks or keyboard commands.
• Notes to yourself.
• A list of what you spent for the day.
• Cheat notes for anything you might need -- html codes, command strings, anything else you may need to cut and paste.
• Use your imagination here, OK?

If it's text and you need to keep it where you can grab it fast, todo.txt may be the way to go.

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