I found the ultimate setup for to-do notes in LaTeX (of which my current thesis draft has a lot). Traditionally, I’ve been using Michael’s ednotes, but they didn’t look nice and they destroyed the page break by creating footnotes when enabled. Then, I switched to Henrik Skov Midtiby’s todonotes, which look great (thanks to TikZ), create a nice summary listing, and use the margin to preserve the page break. The only thing that’s missing is the possibility to annotate a complete range of text, which Michael’s ed package supports by the oldpart/newpart environments – and which he has recently spiced up with some color. So here is how to load both packages:
\usepackage{savesym}
\savesymbol{todo} % occurs in both packages
\usepackage[show]{ed}
\restoresymbol{ed}{todo} % now available as \edtodo
\usepackage{todonotes}