Before continuing, watch his talk.
The late Randy Pausch was a smart man who knew how to manage his time effectively. Most importantly, he taught us all before his rather untimely demise how to adopt the practices that made him productive and successful.
This is my take on implementing his style of "to do" list, which is
something I've been using since my days as an undergraduate mathematics
major. I diverge from his in that, mainly, I don't use Emacs anymore,
and I don't particularly like the diffs from git whenever I do a
:,!sort in vi.
The list format is incredibly simple.
0 this is a high-priority list item
9 this is a low-priority list item ("someday, maybe")
1 this is an item that is somewhere in the middle, likely to be done tomorrow
x0 this is a high-priority item that is done
That's pretty much it.
These are written mostly with the Unix philosophy in mind, and the
scripts themselves are barely even 10 lines of Bash. They're also
written to be composable, so things like grep and sed should largely
work as intended.