Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

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I used a Bullet Journal for a couple months a few years ago. I ended up moving away from it, for a couple reasons:

- It didn't suit my note-taking instincts: most things that I think are worthy of writing down are either much longer than one sentence (notes from a meeting, say) or much more numerous such that they would drown out the todos and events.

- It was difficult to generate a view of "okay, what needs to be done today?"

- It felt frustratingly analog: things like running monthly migrations and building up a table of contents was one of those moments where I was just like Ugh, can't I have an app do this?

These are largely quibbles with my own personal habits and tendencies, rather than flaws with the system itself. I'm happy with my replacement approach -- Todoist with daily Bullet Journal-esque notes that get migrated at the end of the day -- but it's still lacking with regards to retrospective.

That being said, Bullet Journals were the first step in getting me to seriously consider how I retain information and organize my tasks, so I'm forever grateful of them for that!

I definitely have the same amazement that you have to monthly migrate things. I am curious if manually doing it encourages some behavior, though.

In particular, I have found backlogs to be a common source of neglected shit.

Yup. I think the process of periodically going through all your stuff and deciding whether or not it's still worth holding onto is a valuable one, but the actual mechanics of doing so in the Bullet Journal fashion felt cumbersome (especially when you're trying to collate stuff.) .

If you don't mind sharing, what's the system that you moved to from Bullet Journal (if any)?

It's less a system and more just a bunch of sources of truth:

1. Anything that's an event gets thrown in Fantastical (or your calendar app of choice.)

2. Anything that's a todo-item gets thrown in Todoist (or your todo-list app of choice). I like Todoist because it's lightweight but I can still categorize stuff based on loose priority.

3. Anything that's a random note also gets thrown where it belongs: if it's a note about a software project, I'll put it in a wiki/GitHub issue/etc for that project; if it's a note about a person I know, I'll throw it in Contacts, etc. etc. (If I'm too lazy to do this -- which is often -- I throw it in a "Notes" Todoist list which I periodically clean up.)

Then, at the start of each day I open my calendar, Todoist, and GitHub, pick up stuff, and write a todo list. Throughout the day, if more stuff comes up I'll write in on the todo list; at the end of the day, if there's still stuff left on the list I'll put it back wherever it belongs.

There's still a definite manual component here -- I'm pretty sure OmniFocus has support for a "today view" that handles all of that for me -- but the tactile nature of writing out specifically what I plan on doing helps me get ready for the day a little, and takes all of like thirty seconds.

(TBH, I think the core trick with all of these systems is being diligent and disciplined about not letting stuff stay in your head because humans [or at least me] are dumb and forget stuff. Once you commit to capturing data quickly and structuring it in some matter, the rest is an implementation detail.)

I really hate the decentral storage of all these things.

Maybe I will write something that finally makes the todos more managable in Google calendar. Events are rather nicely handled, but todos are horrible, but I don't want them in one of the millions external todo apps.

I wrote a work-shift UI for Google calendar, that helped my girlfriend to store her shifts with a few simple clicks.

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