![]() I record notes and observations as I go through the week, then export these to a text file so they’re all in one place. Monday “folded”, Tuesday expanded screenshot courtesy of the author By the same token, while it’s possible to hide tasks and notes, everything can be at-a-glance visible if that’s what you want. This is a great way to declutter a paper and see only what’s essential at any given time. Similarly, notes for any given project, todo or day can be tabbed and collapsed so they’re hidden until needed. This week I needed to buy a couple of items for the office I put the task in the relevant day, included the hyperlink, and tabbed this in so I could hide the details until I wanted to make the purchase. TaskPaper also recognises URLs, which I love. Placing the cursor on each of the tasks and tabbing once means each day can be collapsed when it’s complete, thereby cleaning up the paper: I don’t feel the need to see what I’ve done on previous days, but it’s handy to see what’s coming up in case I need to move things around. While it’s possible to hide tasks and notes, everything can be at-a-glance visible if that’s what you want Then I look at my paper from the previous week, copy across anything relevant, and append the weekly notes and observations to a separate file. Every Sunday I duplicate the week ahead template, rename the duplicate file as Week and save it. Ending such headings with a colon in TaskPaper makes each one a project. ![]() It’s a pretty simple format: Objectives, Notes, Monday to Friday, Weekend, Next week, and finally, Notes and Observations. Having adopted the weekly plan, I’ve made a little template. TaskPaper’s flexibility gives us all the freedom we want. We can plan the journey in detail, but we need to consider the possibility that we might want to take a break or stop somewhere unexpected. This can both stimulate our creativity and feed our productivity.īy contrast, adopting a plan that’s too rigid is like putting ourselves on tracks, reducing our ability to change direction. And building in some breathing space also leaves us open to new ideas, insights and spontaneity. If things come off the rails, or even if we should get ahead of ourselves a little (apparently this can happen), we need to be able to shift things around with a minimum of fuss. ![]() As creative people, business owners, project managers – whatever we are – we need the ability to react to changing situations. The app’s greatest asset? Its flexibility.Īdopting a plan that’s too rigid is like putting ourselves on tracksįlexibility is important. But TaskPaper is a whole different story. Things just doesn’t feel right, with all those boxes in boxes. Then I tried Apple Notes, which does the job and looks good, but didn’t feel like the right place for my weekly agenda. I first tried setting out my weekly plan in Notion this worked well, but I had some issues with the app. I know, I know - you’ll say this is all part of GTD and it’s been around for years but the thing is, dear reader, I am always fashionably late to the party. It’s something of a revelation to discover how satisfying it is to look back across the week and see all the progress I’ve made. While I’m not yet sure time blocking is something I’ll do, I’ve adopted the weekly plan with enthusiasm. In a recent episode of the Focused podcast by David Sparks and Mike Schmitz, the two presenters expounded the benefits of planning the week ahead, time blocking and so on. Although quite obvious that I needed some kind of management system, I’d never really taken the time to work out what this should be. A fault of mine is that I tend to take on too much: enthusiasm and drive can be both a blessing and a curse. At any one time over the years I’ve always had several projects on the go, to the extent that I’d forget what some of them were. ![]() But I’ve always flown by the seat of my pants. I’d looked at TaskPaper a couple of times before and wasn’t sure, but I recently stumped up the cash and invested in this plain text productivity app. And although I know they’re very popular for such purposes, Craft and Notion just don’t seem to fit the bill. I’ve tried Things (twice) and found it frustrating OmniFocus is all bells and whistles and too expensive Apple Notes could work, but that would be a bit of a fudge with many compromises. I’ve struggled to find a productivity, task manager, todo list app, or whatever you want to call it, that’s right for me. ![]()
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