This is a short update to my planning habit I started two months ago. Today is the last day and I believe I’ve come up with a super simple yet powerful method.
As I said earlier, in the last 30 days I tried to improve my existing system because I felt it was unproductive for me to have a big list of projects and tasks as a todo list.
After trying both paper and software solutions, I decided to stick with software because I spend most of my day in front of a computer, and when I’m not in front of a computer I’m usually already doing high value tasks.
The following system works very well for me and it’ll probably work well for you if you spend a lot of time in front of a computer.
Long term planning
I use things to keep track of all my ideas and to plan for my projects. I like things because it’s easy to create new projects and add deadlines. It also creates recurrent tasks for you. I usually open things only one or two times per day.
Daily planning
For daily planning, I use a simple software called anxiety, which is a simple and minimal todo list. I usually write 2 or 3 tasks I want to accomplish for the day. If I used thins for this, I could get easily distracted by all the other tasks.
Inbox
As my inbox, I either use things (if it’s open) or notational velocity, which is a super fast software tool to keep notes. I also use this software to keep track of imminent tasks have to do to accomplish something (for example at work)
Conclusion
While the software tools I suggested are only available for mac os x, I’m sure you can find the same functionalities in every platform you choose to use (even paper). I hope this can help but you need to try different solutions to figure out what works better for you.