To Do List Template – Personal Kanban Backlog

Description

To Do List Template – Personal Kanban Backlog

I use a to do list template to manage all of my personal and professional tasks.  It used to be a paper system, but I wanted to keep a record of what I had accomplished and stacks and stacks of paper made that difficult.  For example, when I would fill up a sheet of paper, I would copy each un-finished task by hand to a new sheet of paper.  It was a lot of work to keep this system updated.  So, I decided to go digital and create an Excel version.

Switching to Excel also gave me some nice new features that made tracking my tasks even easier.  I was able to add color coding to my spreadsheet to show the tasks that I was working on, tasks I had completed, and tasks that were running late.

My To Do List Template Fields

My paper system only had three fields: the task description, the date the task needed to be finished, and the date the task was actually finished.  In my digital to do list template I now have the following fields: Assinged Date, Description, Target Complete Date, and the Actual Complete date.  These fields let the spreadsheet do some automated actions to help it be even more helpful in managing tasks.   Here is what it can do.

Color Coding

If the Target Completion date is in the past and there is no Actual Completion date entered the spreadsheet will color code the task line in red to indicate it is late.  A task that has no Actual completion date and a Target Completion date in the future will be color-coded yellow to show it is in progress.  A green color-coded task means the Actual Completion date entered was on or before the Target Completion date and that the task was completed on time.  Finally, a to do list template task with an Actual Completion date later than the target date is coded as red to show it was late.