Every week I create a weekly note, and write my to-dos for the week. I may add more items to it during the week. If any items didn’t get done I roll them over to the next weekly note or drop them. That’s it.

I usually write my to-dos from scratch without looking at the previous week’s list. This helps me decide which items I should drop. If I can’t remember a to-do it probably wasn’t that important.

s/ideas/canaries/

https://canarytokens.org/

In environments where regular rotations are required, I print off a new "biscuit" via `(date ; pwgen $PWGEN_FLAGS) | lpr`. I then append to the candidate password something of a personal identifier that only I know.

A few coworkers identified which systems allowed us to re-use passwords, fixed passwords, non expiring reset passwords, etc. warning signs with the password on the back too.

On-demand RICO says hello, https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/RICO

At work I do it daily, and also have a notes section. That way I can go to any day (in Obsidian’s calendar) and see what I did that day if/when needed. I also have a fresh scratch pad each day instead of a giant tab in my editor that holds onto things for months or years without context. Reminders kind of work as well. If I’m doing something today that needs follow up in 2 weeks, I pre-make a placeholder note for 2 weeks from now with the to do, and when I get to that day I see it.

It took me about 15 years trying every tool and system under the sun, and then I stumbled across doing this organically based on what I felt I needed. It’s been going good for several years now, which is something I’ve never been able to say before. That said, I’d be lost without the calendar view, it’s very helpful for me.

At home, I tried this, but it’s too granular. I tried weekly, that even seemed too granular. I’m at the point where when I feel like getting some stuff done, I make a list, and keep that list until it’s done (or things age to the point they don’t matter). Then some time goes by until I need another one.

Edit…

I just looked at Tweek, it seems more similar to TeuxDeux, than NotePlan. But NotePlan seems more like what the grandparent was talking about (at least in my interpretation).

The only thing that remains the same is the header has 'yearly goals'.

It's easy and I can jettison the previous week's unfinished tasks (hey they didn't get done so were they really important?).

(It also creates snapshots that roughly show if the list is growing much faster than things are being done and signals I need to shed load)

You can manage long-term lists without losing items to the abyss by using prioritization techniques.

I personally don't need a reminder to go off for a thing I need to do today or tomorrow, but something happening next week or next month that I need to check up on or arrange. Those tend to be the kind of expensive and really annoying thing to fix after neglecting

If an item has been on your TODO list for years, it's most likely not worth doing anyway.

Might as well lose the paper upon which the item is written.

This is me.

Skill issue notwithstanding.

I think their point was specific to to-do lists which usually aren't around for that long and in my experience rarely need to be searched.

And sure, if you feel like you forget or cannot distinguish between important things for any reason then a different method is fine too.

I already own a Remarkable 2 but I really don't like it - it's not much more than an e-ink college block. After almost two years they added the function to draw straight lines, meanwhile I still can't search in handwritten notes - not even after converting them to text. You can add tags and the search works for them, but don't add a tag and you won't easily find the page.

So, I'm thinking about buying the Samsung Tab s9+ for studying math and sumerian, but generally also for planning. I find just having all my notes, pdfs, etc. with me, combined with smart features like search is invaluable.

I’m also a primarily “Apple” household but the iPad’s multitasking is absurd, whereas with DeX mode you get a full windowing system that works sanely. I love my Tab :)

Also I’m pretty sure that it came with the S pen in the box - which works super well. A joy to write with.

There's a paper-like screen addon by Samsung that apparently provides a similar writing feel as the Remarkable or paper - I might get that as well.

I also have the keyboard that magnets to the tablet -- my only complaint about it is it's too small (kinda my fault because I have the 10" or whatever size of tablet though) - and the top (number) row is crowded and misaligned compared to a normal keyboard, so I get a lot of typos involving the right half of that row, and sometimes strike the infernal screenshot key up there. I haven't seriously looked into it yet, but I would definitely consider another keyboard if it attached the same way (don't really want another device to have to charge separately).

https://ewritable.com/best-e-ink-tablets/#Best_Dedicated_Not...

> [...]

> The native note-taking software has some really nice and unique features that I find really useful. For example, when I start a new page, I write the title at the top, and then lasso-select it and turn it into a heading and the Supernote automatically builds me a Table of Contents based on my headings. I can also draw a five-pointed star anywhere on the canvas to mark the page as important and then do a search for all my stars so that I can action them. There is a touch-sensitive swipe bar on the right-hand bezel which brings up a quick access menu whatever I am doing so that I can quickly flick between notebooks and documents. And the handwriting search feature is supremely fast.

> [...]

I think a new version of the A5 is coming out this or next year, but they're generally pretty expensive - almost as expensive as the Samsung Tab.

The thing about both paper and Org-roam/Emacs, is that it's under your own control, and can be tailored to meet your own actual needs, not how someone else thinks you should do things. That's where Apple Notes etc. fall down.

Files are named hierarchically with periods. I have top-level categories that have changed little over the years. `con.` for concepts, `lit.` for documents, `proj.` for projects... you get the point, I'm not listing all of them unless someone really just wants me to.

My go-to example is always Star Wars. `lore.sw` is my top-level Star Wars note. I also have `lore.sw.chron` which is the chronological watching order. There's also `game.sw` which contains a list of Star Wars games I've found.

This extends to non-note files as well. For images of something I use `.img.[date].#.[ext]`, so for example I have some pictures of my cat named `ppl.neck.img.2024.03.15.1.raw`. I have a video of him murdering a bird too, `ppl.neck.vid.2024.05.22.murdering-a-bird.mp4`... As you can see, sometimes I replace the number with a nice title.

The modularity of it all is great. I can add anything anywhere at any point in the hierarchy without having to re-name things. I name things exactly what they are. The hierarchy can be sparse, parent notes don't have to exist. I can name something `stuff.something.i-dont-know.gif` without having any notes for `stuff.` or `stuff.something.`

I have notes on paper as well, and they use the same system, with the hierarchical name printed in bold at the top of the paper. `self.passwords` is a paper note for obvious reasons. I also keep most of my `sys.internal.` documentation on paper because my computer might not work when I need it most, though a lot of them do have computer versions which I just print out when I change because it's too much to write by hand.

agenda.: single file, my main TODO. I can also add `.agenda.` anywhere in any hierarchy to make a topic-specific agenda.

archive.: I just slap `archive.` on the front of any filename I want to archive.

con.: notes about concepts

cook.: my cookbook

film.: movies, shows, etc.. Contains both notes and actual films

game.: game notes, downloads, old versions, mod version archive, skins, settings exports, etc.

grp.: social groups, movements, governments, companies, religions, etc. Mostly notes from school and research from work, but some political stuff too.

home.: my house

inbox.: single note, anything can go in here for later processing if I'm feeling lazy

journal.: journal, organized by date (journal.2024.08.27). Hasn't been used in years.

lang.: languages of all kinds; spoken, programming, everything. There's `lang.lisp` next to `lang.latin`

lit.: literature, documents, etc.. Organized as `lit.author.series.document.chapter`. I have a lot of books.

log.: logs, never used this one actually

lore.: research about fictional worlds (I'm into worldbuilding)

meta.: about this collection

music.: playlist dumps, song downloads

ppl.: people

prod.: products

proj.: projects

school.: school stuff, organized as `school.institution.course.unit.chapter.assignment.document`

self.: me

social.: social media

soft.: software

sys.: my systems

veh.: my vehicles

Bonus: I also have `woodheart.` for my worldbuilding project, which contains a copy of most of the above categories within it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Organization

It has databases that allow you to create many different views of things, but actually using this capability is one of the most frustrating things ever. No keyboard shortcuts; actions that you'd typically do in Excel don't work here; every table is its own page, even when it doesn't need to be; and so on.

You can also create a plain old table within Notion, but all of the complaints above apply here. Why even have a table object when it's going to just be a gimped database?

It has static web page hosting built in, but so does Confluence and other wikis.

If you try to use Notion off-line, it randomly won't show you changes until you're back online.

---

That said, paper is great for worm (write once, read many) type data but is inflexible and really difficult to search through later.

Journaling is a great example.

It is easy and tempting to start with a paper journal. Feels more personal and connected. However, when you want to know how you felt on this day five years ago, or you want to find a pattern to explain moods that don't make sense, you'll spend ages sifting through notebooks. That's assuming that you haven't lost them.

Apps work so much better here.

I started journaling in 2014 but started journaling _daily_ after discovering Daylio in 2021. I use Day One now.

I regret not having used an app for this everyday.

There are so many moments of my life that I lost or don't remember very well because I wanted to "handwrite my journals" despite, often, not having the time to do so. Journaling has helped me understand why I feel things and when and gave me a great first step towards fixing them.

I will say that trying to modify a table in Notion makes me want to throw my Mac into the ocean and go back to paper and briefcases.

So its ticktick + one note (used to have Evernote until they mucked it up).

I've tried journaling but never feel like I have enough interesting things to document. Have you tried Apple Journal? Do you have templates you recommend?

I think the thing that a lot of folks miss is that it's a framework that's meant to grow incrementally with how you go through life and work.

Without a bag to keep everything together, I got tired of misplacing my notebooks, one for each class, so I started living out of only one at a time, which then led me to set up a sort of table of contents and numbered pages so I could find things. It also let me cope with my as-yet-undiagnosed OCD and ADHD by giving me the permission just to start at whatever page and treat the bound pages as a linked list instead of an array. (Bonus: the table of contents became a sort of allocation bitmap.)

Homework due dates and holidays and birthdays begat calendars of various sorts, inconsistent study habits begat habit trackers, notes from class meetings begat dailies wherein I braindump about whatever, etc., but none of that happened overnight. It built up over months to years.

Journaling is about the stuff you want to remember later so that you can reflect on it. Most of my entries involve doting on my cats (so many days where I'm just like, "Valérian was an aggressively cuddly purrbucket again" or "Laureline brought me another sock from the hamper") and, like, "on a lark, I dug out my old ThinkPad to find it actually isn't inoperative."

But fwiw, what works for me is to have notes everywhere. I take notes in a journal, ephemeral notepad, emails, texts to myself, apple notes, and orgmode. I just want to have lots of accessibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshedding

Nowadays I gave up on all the Notion/Evernote/orgmode/whatever-tool-someone-is-peddling with systems of systems, tagging, etc. to organise oneself.

I realised after getting a bit older that pen and paper is the system that works for me, just a nice notebook, without pressure to use it for everything, no rigid system but a system that organically evolved for myself; keep it accessible wherever I'm that I might need to take notes, and it just flows while being easy to use for myself.

I think that looking for the perfect amazing organisational system is just another form of procrastination. I'm very happy for the people who manage to have found a very neat system for themselves, searchable, available on every device, etc., but it's not for me.

For me…

- One trusted place for all the notes (something that the stuff everywhere model lacks… things get lost or end up being hard to find)

- Portable, avoiding lock-in. The assumption is the usefulness of the notes will outlive any closed platform.

- Multiplatform, with sync. To make it easy to have that one trusted place, and it always be accessible.

- Modern features… can’t sketch too well in markdown and embedding stuff is tedious and doesn’t seem like it will scale well over time without tooling. But tooling brings back the lock-in issue.

And probably some other stuff. The perfect system doesn’t really exist. Compromises need to be made. Each person makes different concessions, while many of us jump from tool to tool, system to system, hoping to have it all, but ultimately living with constant pain and disappointment.

I’ve given up. I’m use Obsidian and work and the Apple stuff at home. If/when I need to migrate off Apple, I’ll deal with it then. Switching every few months sucks.

Neurotic people thinking that they are going to organize their existence on this earth.

Then the fight moves to pens vs. pencils. Fountain pens and carpenter's pencils will slug it out for supremacy in the comments. One lone maniac will die on the quill hill.

- people use clay tokens to keep track of their herds/inventory

- these tokens get put into clay balls for security/transaction grouping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)#Origins

- to avoid breaking and remaking the clay balls all the time, people record on the outside of the ball symbols indicating which tokens are on the inside of the ball

- at some point, some bright person realises that all you need to do is make the second set of symbols on a tablet; as long as you have them recorded, all the balls and tokens are just legacy

But as soon as you need automation, it’s a different story. I couldn’t rely only on paper notes to keep track of my work.

Obsidian has been very useful to keep track of my list of tasks and report what I’m doing. I would spend much more time doing all that with paper.

Details of my setup at https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/07/16-obsidian-contractor/

On the other side, I have some years of GTD practice and know, that tools themself matter little for productivity. I have some minimal feature-set I expect to be there, like some kind of daily outline and priorities and I don't care about the rest. Omnifocus is nice, but I barely use it on mobile devices, beorg is sufficent. Know you needs and don't go more complex than that.

Lately I’ve taken to jotting down lists of things on my mind on index cards so I can carry those around and refer to them without the distraction of a phone. The nice thing is that space is limited, so I can’t take on too much at a time. Constraints are a good thing.

You might use it just for a day or two, but something clicks in your head, you find your workflow, and now you’re able to use more specialised tools.

Bonus: the handwriting is searchable.

paper has never worked for me, it's hard to keep track of it and others can easily read it.

BUT I keep all my new ideas, thinking, todos, agenda, ... offline (analog) to prevent AI tools reading them and sending it back to big corps. I keep them in a Filofax so it's easy to shuffle/insert/... pages if required.

I work in IT since 1995 (now 15 years as a freelance/consultant) and honestly I start returning back to analog information management for most of my stuff. I don't trust big corps. It's not new but it's more true today than ever.

So if you have a really revolutionary new idea/discovery: NEVER EVER put it on ANY big corps infrastructure (Cloud, OS, ...) to prevent leaking it everywhere.

* I text myself on slack random idea I have about various projects

* I regularly use a white board to write down the current state of all my projects, where they are at, what needs to be done

* I have a notebook that I write todos in for day to day things

Also these things are basically interchangeable. I have had several different thoughts about how to make a better organisation system through software. But so far I didn't come up with one that i would abandon my research to spend the time writing organisational software instead.

What cheap hosted service should I be using that lets me CRUD my text files on mobile + desktop and share with others?

I usually send a picture of it to my partner.

I sit here at my desk with post it notes scattered everywhere, organizing my thoughts and things to do for the day. Something about being able to physically move them around and cross things off just makes it easier for my brain to work.

The problem with this workflow is getting it into the apps that I use to organize my life. These change from time to time, but Sunsama is the clear winner for me at the moment.

PostIt has a great app to use your camera to organize your notes.

I've also found that Apple's FreeForm has a fantastic feature for scanning. Over the weekend I scanned hundreds of old post-it notes of mine that I was trying to declutter, yet some of them had important thoughts that I wanted to stash for later. I used Freeform to scan all my notes.

Next up I'll try feeding this to a model and see if it can organize my notes and create action items from them.

Come to think of it, I could have done none of this and just organized the notes by hand while scanning them :)

Maybe I should try turning my computer off next time and just thinking before I do something.

-Actual physical whiteboard

-Notepads (moleskine, amazon branded notepad, all colors, fancy stuff that is $20+)

-Obsidian with a bunch of plugins including Exalidraw (I wish flowcharting could be easier but still sucks compared to yED)

-Google Keep (I use it on my iPhone and sync with my computer when needed. I only use it before homedepot or some hardware store shopping. I don't use lists for grocery)

-One Note

-Wacom Intuos Pro with other 3rd party drawing / note taking apps

-My own website (Wordpress with notetaking plugin to have it on the "cloud")

-Perfex CRM

-Asana (still use it for client projects with limited access to them)

-My own Kanban mutation

-Microsoft Notepad in a dedicated folder for notes (was probably the longest-running among all other methods)

-yED Graph (still use it for client presentations with basic flowcharts)

-Google Calendar with excessive notes

-365 Word With fancy plugins

-Notepad++ since it doesn't delete if I don't save the document (MS Notepad brought it with win11 though)

Nothing worked out but I am forcing myself to use Obsidian in a Dedicated monitor and never move it. I think I am getting close to liking it. I don't know what's wrong. These apps are SO CLUTTERED. And real paper is not searchable. I have a shelf dedicated to 1/5 used notepads.

Additionally, I thought I didn't like writing with a pen. Then I dedicated a very good chunk of my life to finding the perfect pen. So far G2 and Jetstream are my favorites. I used zebra in the early 2010s because I thought "If police are using it, it must be good". It wasn't that good. I needed flow.

For basic todos like "buy the milk" I've tried for a little time Home Assistant tasks, very basic more comfy than Orgzly, but I do not need much of such lists so... I do not much feel the need of anything special. I've used of course in the past paper notes, I tend to forget them when used as reminder so they are not better for this specific usage, while I still have a small A7 notebook for sudden things to note when I'm not at the desktop.

These days, the only time I use pen and paper is during language interpretation sessions. It helps me retain very short-term memory, but afterward, I can hardly make sense of any of the notes I took.

For everything else, I rely on apps. I currently use OneNote. I've tried various solutions, but I found OneNote strikes the best balance between online and offline functionality—it’s saved me many times in situations with spotty or slow international roaming.

Use a pencil instead ??

As for pencils, they’re not much better than pens in this regard. The smudging issue persists, just in a different form.

I’ll agree somewhat on pencils, though. I used to have gray hands when I was in high school after all my notes.

Use either todo notebook [1] or a todo card [2] and voila.

[1]: https://www.jetpens.com/Paperian-Make-a-Memo-Sticky-Notes-To.....

[2]: https://www.jetpens.com/Paperian-Make-a-Memo-Sticky-Notes-To.....

Paper is a lot of extra work for the only gain to pretend you are doing something simple.

"I can't turn my paper into a Vector DB to build a RAG pipeline and connect it to a voice chat so I can "talk" to my notes" :'D.

Plain text is enormously useful, as it turns out, and the fewer bells & whistles, the better!

I used to struggle with a lot of tools before too and now use org-roam for longer term notes. The linking model helps a lot with just _writing_ the stuff down and not worrying about how to organize it too much in the moment.

Creating my todo list, investor update lists, company admin info, idea explorations, and everything else always involves me evolving the idea continuously and shifting things about as the structure changes.

With paper this means using an eraser until I end up with a crumpled mess, or laboriously rewriting it all over and over.

I like the tactile nature of paper, if only I could select chunks by dragging and erase (fully) without wrecking it.

I'm not seriously suggesting that you do this, but the term "cut & paste" originated from a concept that predates digital text editing ;)

Now I just track my blood pressure on paper.

For when I need to write by hand, I moved to a reMarkable digital tablet. For notes, I've been experimenting with obsidian/logseq, and it's been going good. For task management , I gotta recommend Super Productivity, it's just fantastic.

I just couldn't live the sticky note life anymore...

Then I transcribe whatever needs to be a little more long term at the end of the day/week into either Apple notes or reminders. Then rip the pages out and bin them.

Im tempted to get something like todoist to organise reminders a little better but I’m cautious that it’s the road to procrastinating.

Don’t do it. I’ve been down that road. Giving up and simply using Apple Note/Reminders is so much easier. I envy people who just use the first thing that falls in their lap and go with it. It’s all good enough. Nothing is that much better to make it worth the hunt.

its good for remember what I was working on yesterday to keep a smooth continuitity. Helps me get 'back on task' quick.

Its seriously just a single document with like 5 bullet points in it each day. I barely ever scroll down. Latest day is always at the top.

I actually think it would be really interesting, if I could point a camera at my notes and somehow have it spit out a Matlab code or something like that. But I’m not sure how it would work. It would need to understand at least that the things in the brackets are sub-matrices…

My only nod to electronic organization is a simple todo app like Things or Todoist.

This way leads to madness!

(*) Ideally use Google glass or another always on camera here

And of course, it’s cloud based and not restricted to only Google platforms. Something Apple will never swallow their pride for no matter how simple the product.

I do love Obsidian. I am sad I did not discover it sooner and suffered through OneNote.

I'm sure there are people who prefer paper for good reasons. But there are no reasons with justifications listed here. Just a very short personal opinion.

If I can't fit it on the card, I know I don't have a chance to get it all done; in this way it's self-limiting.

I use Apple Notes for scratch notes and GitHub Issues for everything else and I couldn't be happier.

But I use a rocket book so I'm not going through endless notepads and can optionally backup to PDF.

At the time, I used Wunderlist (later To-Do) for work and home lists. I also had a simple scratch pad in a text editor as well as PDAs prior to that.

I came back to paper. In the 90s, before I got a PDA, it was a small black notebook I kept in my pocket. These days I use printer paper. I start with a blank sheet on Monday, copy over the stuff from the previous week that I didn't complete, and then add new items for the week. On the right margin, I make notes of longer-term projects and invoices to send out, as well as some "home" to-dos usually relating to kids.

I find it's easier to add new items without opening up an app and navigating to the right file. I can also jot down quick notes or facts or phone numbers without having to go through clicks and keyboard shortcuts and arrow keys.

If I'm on the road, I'll use a text file on my laptop. I also still use To Do for a few personal lists (like recipes) but it's no longer part of my daily work routine.

Not sure why the OP feels the need to be so vehement in their opinion.

I LOVE paper. I also like whiteboards. I also like being able to search through my megabytes of notes for something silly I was wrestling with 2.5 years ago. It might be in a TODO list even. I'm messy, I don't care to try to organize such things, but (rip) grepping still provides value. I don't want to "just use fucking $ANYTHING", thanks very much, man.

How is that even possible

Well, you literally could

I use a single sheet of paper every day. I write down 2-4 things I want to get done that day and any small tasks I need to do (ie, reply to x email).

The rest of the paper is for notes or thoughts throughout the day.

At the end of the day I take a new sheet of paper and write the next days tasks and notes. I then toss the old page in the trash.

Every. Fucking. Day.

Works like magic.

I mean, how do you organise all that paper??

Are you just in a scenario where you have absolute control over what you do and on what timeline?

If not:

Do you ever lose track of older items (i.e. forget about them for a long time because your eyeballs don't land on them)?

How do you decide when to remove something that isn't done?

Alternatively, if things never enter the list faster than they leave, how do you predict whether something will or will not violate that rule at entrance time?