I really like writing things down. It helps in so many ways it can be difficult to fully articulate all of the ways. But no system is perfect, and I am constantly reevaluating what works for me and the conditions I find myself in. Here are some of the things - techniques and tools - I find especially useful and what hasn’t totally worked for me.

Obvious thing that hasn’t worked for me: Planner notebooks. Day view, week view, month view, Academic year, calendar year - these have never lasted very long and subsequentially not been very useful for me. Why that’s the case is a little more nuanced, but the basic idea is the problem of collection of information/refreshing the information/ and the relevancy of information later. I definitely find that the format of planners makes it difficult to toggle between the necessary contexts to plan appropriately and sharing that information (in a business or family) more difficult than needs to be. Last, If an appointment has a lot of detail, planner notebooks aren’t often set up for a lot of notes. This leads to the problem of “what was that meeting about, again?”

Shorter above ‘graf: shared online calendars (google calendar, iCal, outlook) make a lot of those problems easier.

So then the basic problem is “what to do today?”

I really wish I could do in depth time blocking. But most of my time and energy is not amenable to blocks of time. I admit freely I’ve got a lot more tiny tasks and it can be hard to even batch those. It’s more typical of my life to be like “Ok, I can get that taken care of before X or after Y.” If I did block my time, it might look like a few giant blocks marked “Reactive”, and I’m not sure that’s worth it. The trick is finding a level of organization that’s valuable enough with out imposing too many costs. Planners impose too many costs, time blocking provides too little value for me right now.

I thought I’d found a silver bullet with Bullet Journal. I know, I know, that was a bad dad moment.

I’ve been trying it for the last 6 months or so, and the results have mostly been positive. The features that have worked really well are these:

  • The Index feature. This is HUGE for helping with the non-reoccuring stuff.
  • Speaking of, the fact that a bullet journal starts completely empty and can be both notes and planning is big. Hell it can be anything you want - this is a big draw to me.
  • The preferred journal, the Leichturm 1917 is fucking beautiful, lays flat, has no-acid paper, and is all around the best single notebook I’ve ever held.
  • How fast it can be: no trying to figure out prioritization of tasks if you don’t want to. no discriminating between tasks and events if you don’t want to. I like that I can just dump my brain out in a list and go from there.

what’s been more challenging and less effective for me has been:

  • the month view - its really, really difficult to use this for me as a prospective tool.
  • integration with digital tools. It’s nice to have a completely analog place to think but for planning I have to rely on digital tools like email and calendars, cause you know, I work with other people.
  • Speed and depth are still in tension. It’s really easy to either quickly dump things on to a list and its really good to have in depth notes, but it’s hard for me to have both in the same space.

What the bullet journal has been great for is two things. First: high velocity task capture - daily planning can take 5 minutes, especially if I have my calendars open. Second: retrospective analysis. Though I don’t do this as much as I like, the bullet journal enables it much easier than comparable tools. Those kinds of insights are the gold of these practices in the first place.

In the new year, I think the approach I’ll might going forward might look something like this:

  • Capture - Email/Calendar/Field Notes constant carry book. Pretty simple. These tools are where everything comes in. It’ll be in my email (work or home), or on the calendar already (or added), or if it comes up in conversation jotted down in the Field Notes constant carry. If it crosses my face, it goes here.
  • Daily planning - one notebook, whose sole purpose is just to list and organize the day ahead. I’m (mostly) a morning person, so taking a few minutes during my first cup of coffee to jot that down.
  • Journaling - get these thoughts and feelings out on paper. it’s the first line of defense for my emotional well being. again, seperate book. Gotta be a daily, will likely be ruled instead of dot grid.
  • Retrospective analysis - this is something that needs to go on the calendar as a regular event. I’m thinking monthly because it’s enough time to look at but not so much time as to forget what happened in that period.
  • Notes - true notes. An index, mind maps, and pages of either things that make the material personal/applicable or unanswered questions about the non-academic stuff that I take in (books I read, movies I watch, music, podcasts, lectures, etc). I’ve talked before about how I mark the hell out of my books, and what I want to do is take those marginalia into a dedicated personal library, to include all the rest of the media I eat up.

That sounds like a lot, and it is, but the cost of not doing it is feeling crazy, all of the time. That’s the problem that notebooks help me solve. But not all varieties of crazy are the same: there’s organizational problems, there’s emotional problems, there’s problems of urgency vs. importance and there’s also a learning problem. What I’ve learned is that I need a system for each, and that the system has to be as easy to use as possible.

What I really want, the brass ring, is to have my life tamed to a degree where the kind of deep work my brain craves and thrives has the space to exist.