Peace of Mind on Paper

I promised myself I would never again write about productivity systems and todo apps. It has been a great way to procrastinate, but enough is enough.

But I can’t help myself.

The last few days I’ve come across reports from people giving up digital productivity systems in favour of pen and paper. I tried just that only three months ago. I had grown weary of waiting for Cultured Code to deliver and I was hesitant to once more dive into Omnifocus and try to stay afloat.

I’ve tried quite a few productivity systems over the years, most of them GTD in combination with digital tools. I even tried to do GTD on paper a while back, but I never enjoyed writing and rewriting all those lists. I always came back to digital.

I’ve come to realise I don’t really need a full-blown GTD-like system. I can’t handle it anyway. I’m just not the kind of guy who will get all those weekly reviews done. I also hate over-planning my life and spending time trying to predict the future is not the direction I need to take my life. I spend way to much time in the future as it is. GTD made me feel walled-in.

I do however enjoy having a single collection point for the bits of life I like to keep track of. I enjoy having a system with alerts, that remind me of my deadlines. I enjoy having my system with me at all times, with my data close at hand.

Last november I started out with the simplest rig I could think of: a Field notes ruled notebook, where I wrote reminders in one long list, as they occurred to me. Tasks with deadlines got a due date in parenthesis. When I had completed all tasks on a notebook page I crossed it out, which was very satisfying.

Every day (well, most days) I would sit down after breakfast, look over my list and doodle a star by tasks I wanted to finish that day. This way I made a small closed list, from my longer master list.

The closed list is something I borrowed from Mark Forster, the man who wrote Do it Tomorrow. On open list is one you add to during the course of your day, like context lists in GTD. A closed list isn’t added to after it’s written. I’m more likely to finish all items on a closed list than even a single item on an open list. An open list rarely gets done. It’s not supposed to be.

I really liked my Field notes system. I liked having a physical list in my hand. I liked the feeling of crossing something out on paper. It had a lower barrier for entry than any of my digital systems.

Since this setup had no concept of start dates, a useful concept when you don’t want to clog your attention with stuff you shouldn’t bother with yet, I also tried a different variant, based on Do it Tomorrow (DIT). I wrote a script, which generated a full-year daily diary in LaTeX, which I typeset and duplex printed on A5 Whitelines ruled paper and put in a Filofax. Each day was a closed task list, and I could start tasks on future dates. This was in effect an analog version of Teux Deux.

However, while my digital systems lived in my iPhone, which I carry anyway, a notebook (not to mention an A5 Filofax) was one more thing to make room for in my pocket or my bag. Also, many of my collected items are digital in nature, such as emails and URLs. Those were hard to handle on paper. I ended up having a second, digital, bucket for those and it became messy. Also, a paper system wasn’t very good at alerting me of deadlines. Apparently I can’t be trusted to manually review due dates, or looking in my calendar every day.

And then there’s the matter of not wasting trees.

I really wanted to make an analog system work for me—for no better reason than my fetish for fine pens and lovely paper. I’m convinced an analog system is better for my brain, but I find the tradeoffs too hard to swallow.

Today I use a scaled down hybrid of GTD and Mark Forster’s work, with lots of self-forgiveness for when my flesh is week. Is use Omnifocus, but I plan on going back to Things once they get their cloud sync up and running.

Or maybe I’ll try paper one more time.