To-dos sort order by due date

[muzak]

Due dates don't exist in Joplin unless you treat alarms as due dates. Also, this feature request thread seems pertinent to your ask: Feature request: ToDo Expiration Dates For Sorting

Here are some ideas:

Install the Note Overview plugin and create a note with this Note Overview code (adapted to your needs). You can then pin that note for visibility. Options include plugins like Favorites or Note Tabs, using tags, or prepending a notebook title with punctuation (_title, .title, etc.) so it appears topmost then placing the note there.

Set alarms for each todo (if they aren't already set). Joplin sorts todo notes with alarms by due date regardless of the note sort order.

Prepend ISO 8601 or similar sortable date formats to todo note titles for better discoverability.

How I ran my todos with Joplin

Re separation: Note Overview let's you filter notes by whether they do/don't include any particular tags Re planning: You could also add the due date to the title in [YY-MM-DD] format which will order them by date alphabetically. If you format as [Px][YY-MM-DD] then it will order by priority first and date second, if you do [YY-MM-DD][Px] it will be vice versa. (This idea is actually really similar to the todo.txt spec)