There are a variety of ways to track what needs to get done in your code. I am a huge fan of Wunderlist as a simple-free checklist to stay on track. GitHub allows you to create checklists, and their Issues functionality is top notch. Finally, some IDEs will automatically find // TODO tags and organize them for you—and this is the functionality I wanted in MATLAB.

I work independently and a lot of my code is experimental. At the end of the day, I can end up with a handful of new files (each with a handful of todos) and a short list of analyses to run. Comments are fast but they often get lost, especially after a file gets closed.

Using MATLAB comments to track tasks seemed like the most agile solution to all my problems. The mattasks project recursively scans a directory for any comment with the format [ ] This is a task! and exports a pretty markdown file with every task, from every file.

Full documentation can be found in the mattasks GitHub repository. The example below was generated by running mattasks.m on the test directory.