For the past couple of years I’ve been trying various organisation and productivity tools/schemes in order to be more organised in my daily life.

I’ve tried:

• GTD
• Google Keep
• Ad-hoc todo lists
• org-mode agenda
• Trello
• many others

While the tools and techniques were interesting, none of them really stuck with me. Part of this is because it’s hard to form a new habit but also it’s hard to know which parts of a technique you should use and which aren’t relevant to you.

Often I would get bogged down in implementation details and tool tinkering, rather than actually using the technique.

Recently I looked at striketh.ru and bullet journalling, and this reignited my love of analogue - pens, paper, propelling pencils, oh my!

I decided that I’d combine aspects of each technique that I’d looked at into something I could probably stick to. By picking just the parts that seemed to fit my needs and existing behaviours, I hoped that I’d come up with something that would work for me and hence be something I could stick with.

In the best pretotyping traditions, I started with a bundle of Index cards, carried with me. The main sections are a daily todo list, individual project tasks lists, and an ad-hoc note area.

One key thing I wanted was to do it every day for 3 months and then review it after that to figure out what works and what doesn’t (No daily tinkering - stick to it and form the habit first). This way I could hopefully make using the system second nature before I start trying to improve it.

So that’s what I’ve done. I use it every week day and some weekends. It’s going well so far - I will write in more detail later how it all works and will write up my 3 month review.