I like to be undistracted for large chunks of the time that I’m working, and I’ve been moving more and more towards going back to paper where my daily planning (but not other planning) is concerned.
In any case, I was wondering if anyone else uses a combination of paper planning alongside Beeminder and your other tracking and planning systems. I’m making a few tweaks to mine and doing a bit of experimenting, and I thought I’d see what others are doing in the process.
Also, it gave me an excuse to post this, which I now have to do a sure-to-be-less-artistic version of…
What I’m doing:
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All capture is done on my planner page, in my main to-do app’s inbox (OmniFocus), or via Siri or Alexa (which just drop it straight into OmniFocus)
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That’s then processed and moved to my master list, where I add deadlines, rough estimates of the time they’ll take, prerequisite info, priority info, etc. (I use OmniPlan for this, which I’ve customized to within an inch of its life.)
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In my weekly planning, I grab items from my master task list (OmniPlan tells me which I have to do, so that’s a pretty easy step) and I put them in a “This Week” project in my to-do app (OmniFocus).
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I also have a “Recurring” project in my to-do app where I put… I’ll let you guess. I keep them there to keep the master task list decluttered (and because project managers aren’t a great place for recurring tasks!)
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In my daily planning, I look only at my “This Week” and “Recurring” folders and plan my tomorrow with only a few important tasks, which I put in my paper planner.
(I’ve been bad about adding too many tasks to my to-do list lately, and I’m reining that in again. Having a laundry list of things to do on a given day is really counterproductive for me. Focus is everything.) -
Periodically, I take pictures of the pages of my planner and cram them into Evernote, which OCRs them so that I can search my handwriting if I need to, rather than furiously flip through pages trying to find where I wrote “that stuff about the thing”. (That also lets me throw out my planners when I’m done with them. Major planner fans are now throwing raw vegetables at me.)
I’ve been tempted to add a habit tracker again, but have wondered whether that’ll feel like overkill alongside tracking in Beeminder. Trying it this month, for science.
Anyway, who else uses paper alongside the digital, and how does it interact with your digital planning and tracking?