Just got exposed to the idea of a “Bullet Journal”, which is a method for organizing your tasks in a running analog notebook. http://bulletjournal.com has the details of what is a fairly basic but effective system.
There’s a certain appeal to it — a lot of the examples that people have posted on YouTube incorporate the sort of creativity one sees with mind-mapping, and some complain that the journal is more like a scrapbook for some. It’s analog, so not subject to battery life, hacking, theft, hardware failure, etc.
My immediate thoughts:
- You definitely need to always have a pen with you as well as the journal
- You don’t need a specific notebook to do it, but people have their favorites, like Moleskine or Leuchtturm 1917.
- It seems like you should also have a flat ruler or template rubber banded to the notebook as well, because you need to draw lines.
- The core system is pretty simple, but people seem to be extending it a lot, doing things like drawing a calendar grid, a habit tracking grid, making special lists.
- If you aren’t very organized, I could see this getting out of your control pretty quickly.
- It doesn’t have a backup, and it is subject to “hardware failure” of sorts (coffee spill, loss, etc.)
- At the end of the month, you have to migrate unfinished tasks, and set up your month plan, etc. That seems time-consuming, especially if you are drawing stuff.
Of course, I’m immediately thinking that this would be much better automated as an app. Big surprise there, I guess, but there seems to be a lot of time spent doing it, and it seems best for people who only have a few things to track.
Going to look into this further, because it seems like it would be a nice programming exercise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Ykq55jFdU