In Don Casey's classic book This Old Boat Don recommends a method of producing and organizing a list of boat improvements. Don suggests using some visual aids in the form of a matrix on paper, a spiral notebook and index cards. My preference is to use web pages and substitiute a table, and web pages rather than spiral notebook pages. Using HTML has the advantage of easy to follow cross references, and easy modification.
This page represents the first step which is to produce an unordered list of improvements that either are needed or just would be nice. Completed projects mostly from the original list are in the right column. The prioritized list (next step in the process) provides a more organized view of the projects.
Having created an unordered list, the next step is to organize the list by categorizing some of the work and establishing priorities.
Its now been quite a few years since this exercise was first done. Maintaining the HTML by hand proved problematic after initially doing the exercise. As projects were completed moving them to the completed list manually and fixing cross references was a chore.
The solution was to list all of the projects in a flat ASCII file and have a perl program generate the HTML. Changing priorities or status at that point became very easy. The entire set of web pages is now quite easy to keep up to date and the visualization of priorities in a table remains a useful planning tool.