Interesting, I don't relate much to either of the statement (not that my experience negates its applicability for other people). On a bit of thought, I find it

Interesting, I don't relate much to either of the statement (not that my experience negates its applicability for other people). On a bit of thought, I find it useful to organize and break down things and maintain lists (the daily/weekly list habit works best for me currently). This is different than emailing things to myself because I maintain an actively curated list that's hopefully logically organized in big and small tasks. On the enterprise software front, I am a linux-friendly software engineer, so commandline tools are my best friend. I am not sure Excel can ever beat the productivity of vim+linux tools, let alone other specialized tools like sql. One thing to note is that a lot of time I deal with production data, so its a huge effort to actually move data to excel.