I’ve experimented with a lot of different task-management systems in my life. My current personal productivity system is a collection of tools and practices carefully honed to help me keep track of everything, and most of it is contained in a single notebook.

Tools

The Notebook

The core of my GTD practice is a black Leuchtturm1917 Dot Grid notebook. I like that it’s unassuming, classic, and versatile. I don’t rely on a specific manufacturer’s page layout or design, just a straightforward expanse of blank paper.

In this notebook, I blend GTD with Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal system.

Index

The Leuchtturm1917 happens to start with a few pages for an Index, or table of contents. This allows me to remember key pages, such as the start of each month or important lists and collections. As part of my monthly review, I go back and add entries that I may want to recall later.

Future Log

Also taken from the Bullet Journal is the next section, my Future Log.

January
S  M  T  W  R  F  S
1  2  3  4  5  6  7     14 Dinner w/ John and Jane
8  9  10 11 12 13 14    3  Dentist Appt.
15 16 17 18 19 20 21    25 Bob's birthday
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31

I don’t use this section a whole lot, but I do like the option of noting future dates and deadlines. In fact, this is probably one of the gaps I’ve yet to fill in my practice - an equivalent of David Allan’s “tickler file”. If I think of something in December that I want to do come January, where do I put it? The Future Log is a good candidate, but my layout means I only get about six lines per month.

Active Section

Finally, we get to the meat of the notebook, starting with a few pages of standardized front-matter. A classic monthly log provides the month at a glance:

January
1 S     New Year's Day
2 M
3 T     Dentist Appt.
4 W
5 R     Board meeting
6 F
7 S
...

Again, I certainly don’t use this as much as I could. As we’ll see, my main schedule is managed elsewhere. I do like the meditative process of setting this up, so I keep it.

The next page is the first of white I call “Area Pages”. I have three such pages, one for each of the main areas of my life: home, work, and TAP (my theater group). Each page is a running list of actionable tasks, plus a small section for projects at the bottom:

Next Actions - Home
* Get oil for car at auto store
* Exchange shirt for different size
* Research personal trainers nearby
...

Projects
* Change oil in car
* Start a fitness routine

As new action items that don’t need to be done immediately enter my system over the month, they get added to the relevant Next Actions list.

After these pages starts a running Daily Log, again in the traditional Bullet Journal sense. Each day starts right after the previous one and contains notes, short-term tasks, key events, and reminders:

Tuesday, January 3
- Unstuffed peppers for dinner?
* Update Jira with latest findings
* Ask Bill about next week's sprint planning
o Dentist Appt. @ 5

This is the working end of my notebook, the place where I can doodle, brainstorm, think, and Get Things Done. I love using this system. Sketching out a software architecture, remembering something one of my reports said for their next 10/10, drafting ideas - putting pen to paper helps me think, and creates a meaningful record of what I accomplished.

Google Keep

The reality of life, however, is that carrying my notebook to a store or dinner is cumbersome. I’d rather embrace technology and travel lighter. That’s where Google Keep comes in. Keep is my tool of choice for quick, rapid capture on the go.

Keep is a barebones notes app by Google. You can create notes with basic text and checkboxes, add links, labels, and colors, and pin notes to the top of the UI. That’s really about it. But this allows for a simple, portable system when my notebook is unavailable.

I use three main notes, each pinned in the app:

• Inbox - a basic text note for storing random ideas
• Next Actions - a checkbox list that’s reserved for actionable items
• Someday/Maybe - a checkbox list that holds my personal incubator

Below these, I create and archive notes however I see fit. Maybe one is a planned holiday menu, while another is an idea for a blog post. Yet another is a packing list, or thoughts about travel plans. I’m pretty liberal with these; whenever I don’t need one, I either delete it (if it truly won’t ever be relevant again) or archive it (if I just want it out of sight until needed again).

Google Calendar

The last main piece of my system is my calendar. Or rather, three calendars: personal, work, and TAP. Between all three areas, it just makes the most sense to manage meetings, events, and appointments digitally. Since everything starts with an invite anyway, this method helps reduce unnecessary work.

I manage calendar sharing settings to reduce friction. The TAP calendar is shared with my personal and work accounts, and my personal one is shared with my work one. So I can be at work and add an event to either of the others.

Text Files

At work, specifically, I keep four text files on my Desktop:

• inbox.txt - a running scratch pad for quickly capturing notes
• projects.txt - larger efforts I’m tracking outside of my team’s sprint work
• areas.txt - high-level roles that I fill, such as “Team Lead” and “Cybersecurity Champion”
• someday.txt - my someday/maybe list

I keep a terminal up on one monitor all the time and use vim to edit these as needed. They’re a sort of lightweight, faster-than-writing-by-hand sub-system that could be an entire GTD implementation on their own.

Physical Tools

Though it seems most of my life is digital nowadays, I do have a system of physical tools to help manage things like papers, instructions, and mail. These tools include a black wire paper tray on my desk which forms my inbox, as well as a two-drawer filing cabinet right below it for reference material.

Thoughts and Closing

So that’s my system in a nutshell! It’s certainly evolved over the years, morphing from plain paper systems to fully-digital and finally settling on the hybrid form it takes today. It’s definitely not perfect. There are a few shortcomings I need to work on:

• As I mentioned, I need something like a tickler file in my notebook. Right now, I just add those future tasks to my Google Calendar, but would rather keep tasks in the notebook if possible.
• There’s a bit of duplication between my Future, Monthly, and Daily Logs. On the one hand it’s repetitive, but on the other I like the deliberateness it introduces to my day.
• I want to better manage my personal someday/maybe list. On the one hand, I could easily just add this to my notebook. But if items stay on the list for longer than I use a given notebook, I’d have to copy them to the next one. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing…

Despite those shortcomings, the beauty of a notebook is that it encourages iteration. Maybe next month I’ll try adopting a new layout, or I’ll tweak how I record a given month’s events. Maybe I’ll experiment with a Weekly Log. Who knows! The notebook is an artifact of its time, changing to suit my needs as they grow and change.

Update 3/17/2023

In the spirit of continuous improvement, I’ve actually changed my system a bit since writing this post! I just started a new notebook and opted not to include miniature calendars in my Future Log. I’ll rely fully on Google Calendar for my date-tracking needs. I’ve also moved my various Project Lists to dedicated pages, as I realized I was hindering my project tracking by trying to limit the list to a few cramped lines.

I’ve also eliminated the four files I kept on my work laptop Desktop. Instead, I’m going to rely more on my notebook for work tracking.

Lastly, I’m experimenting with keeping Someday/Maybe lists in Google Drive. Some of the items on these lists are truly ambiguous, and I’d rather not have to copy them across notebooks.