Haunted by a Red Queen to-do list

The faster I run, the faster my to-do list grows, and the faster I see I must run. Every day I swat angrily at the varyingly important tasks that past me has given to present me.

The task list is in chronological order, chunked by day, using a "" prefix to indicate complete. Had I proper foresight I tell myself, I would have at least used Markdown when I started it, where instead of a * I would have used " [ ]" and "* [x]" to prefix each line. There are legitimate pros and cons to consider using Markdown however. In this case the most practical benefits of it are that you can denote headings with # or ## or ###, and a strike-through with [item] but you can also make basic tables and embed images the same way you would with html. However, that latter stuff is a little too fine-dining for a personal to-do list in my opinion, as time is really of the essence.

If you're needing a professional looking to-do list for work or something, then the trade-offs are slightly different. Pure Markdown has some issues. First, you'll notice that you need to put two spaces at the end of each line for . That's not very "time is of the essence" in my opinion. And then you will note that rendering Markdown requires a text editor that can do that, and I will not seriously suggest using pandoc terminal commands for a simple to do list, and for a more exaggerated form of that same reason I do not recommend reStructured text for a to-do list. So for text editing I recommend Atom  as it has quite a buffet of packages that are easy to install and allow you to do things like mix Markdown with Latex. While this can tempt you into breaking convention---and therefore portability---because of the idiosyncratic set of packages that will be needed to properly interpret your document, it is easy to imagine recovering that portability with a series of package installation calls at the start of your document like so:

apm install language-latex
apm install language-markdown
...

I should also note that QOwnNotes  has treated me well for many years as it is very specifically designed to sync with Owncloud/Nextcloud and I'm hesitant to uproot that system for something like "atom-ownsync" which doesn't seem to get updated very often.