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Right off the bat I think it’s worth emphasizing: this system works for me. I’ve tried a bunch of different systems like GTD, pomodoro, online checklist tools like Google Keep, and others, and landed on this system for myself. I’m sharing it because maybe it will be helpful for you, but I’m going to write it as what I do and how it works for me. If you try it there’s a solid chance you’ll have to change it to work for you.

Should you listen to me? Am I particularly successful or productive? Perhaps not. But I am a regular dude who gets stuff done juggling work, side work, more side work, family, friends, household tasks, personal care, creative pursuits and hobbies, and the occasional leisure. I’d be able to do a lot of it without my system, but am confident I get more done with it than without it.

The format

This is the simple part: it’s an index card. One index card for each week.

1. At the top is the week in the format “Week of 2024-07-29”, where the date is the Monday
2. Rows of 5 checkboxes (for each weekday) for daily tasks. It could be 7 boxes, but I like to not be accountable for things on the weekend
3. Rows that start with a single checkbox, each something I’ve committed to doing eventually

So yes, it’s a checklist with a label. It seems like a pretty obvious system because that’s what it is.

I like an index card because it doesn’t take up much space on my desk. I like an index card because, unlike a planner or journal it doesn’t have all the baggage of previous weeks, nor the threat of unknown coming weeks. It just is.

An index card is also tangible and in-your-face. In combination with the rules, that means I can’t just write out a checklist like I can in some cloud software and then have it be out-of-sight and out-of-mind. I’m practically forced to engage with my list and continue it from week to week.

Mise en place

On Sunday night if I’m on top of things or think I’ll be extra busy in the coming week, or Monday morning if I try to break away for my desk for the weekend, I grab a blank index card (never the back side of a previous week’s card) and put the previous week’s card next to it.

I fill out the “Week of…” line and the daily task rows, then put any tasks from the previous week that remain unchecked after the daily tasks. This is part of “the rules” (below), and a key part of the system underlying the index cards: the act of having to transcribe a task to the next week is a nudge to get it done so you don’t have to keep transcribing it week after week.

After the known tasks I take a peek at my email accounts for anything task-ish there, plus check my clients’ various and sundry project management systems to see if I’m assigned anything I forgot to put on the lists. Then I just think about the week and if there’s anything for myself, my family, my friends, or my home that should get done this week.

Once all the tasks are entered on the new card:

1. I put the new card on the front-right corner of my desk and put the pen on top of it. I always know where a pen is, and never have an excuse not to write a new task on the card
2. I walk the old card over to a cardboard box in my closet and haphazardly place it there. The old card no longer serves a purpose but might be nice to reminisce about someday

Having a time and place for these routines, these habits is a big part of the system. It also feels like a ceremony to some extent, like I’m ridding myself of last week and becoming present in the new one.

Daily tasks

I really like the rows of daily tasks. They are all easy to accomplish, and even if I don’t accomplish some big task on the list for a day or two I’m still checking things off. That keeps momentum in the system all the time and probably does something science-y to my neurotransmitters. These are the daily tasks that have been sticky for years now:

• Morning routine
• Morning constitutional
• Hug wife
• Work out

Morning routine is the easy one. I wake up, check my phone and get caught up on emails and headlines before getting out of bed, use the bathroom (and always forget to take Seth Roberts’ self-experimentation advice and look at my face a while in the morning), get my water and coffee and optional protein-forward breakfast going, and take my allergy medicine + vitamin D supplement + multivitamin + lip balm. I do the lip balm last so I remember whether or not I’ve taken my medicine. Then I make our bed, which isn’t my favorite part of the day but I have checkmarks to make.

Morning constitutional is kind of a pain. Often I’ll sleep until nearly working hours and then have to wrangle 10 minutes between meetings to go outside and walk a little bit. Even if I do get up early, I don’t want to instantly go do stuff, but I chase that checkmark, darnit! They say there’s a benefit to walking (especially in nature) in the morning. I’ve been doing daily walks for the better part of a year and can’t say I feel a difference, but it’s part of my ritual now. It’s kind of wild how many T’s are in the word ‘constitutional’.

Hug wife is also easy. I feel a little self-conscious that I use a productivity system to remind myself to be affectionate with Shelby, and sometimes feel bad when there’s a busy day and we don’t have a hug and the checkbox is unchecked, but overall I love hugging my wife and like checking boxes, too. I’ve chosen to overcome the negative feelings and focus on the positive.

Work out helps me embrace the un-checked boxes in this world, haha. It’s a rare occasion that I jog two days in a row much less 5 weekdays, so I don’t think I’ve ever checked all 5 boxes in a given week. Working out is just something I’ve committed to doing. The ambiguity of “work out” rather than having rows for lifting weights and jogging separately also means that I can be a little loose about checking the box, and might be able to check off more boxes if I can convince myself to do a push-up or something.

Timesheets was a daily task when I was self-employed, but I retired it when I took a permanent full-time job. If you’ve had to submit your billable time to multiple client time-tracking systems every week and also invoice clients without their own systems, you know there’s no viable alternative to just staying on top of this boring admin work. Now that I bill low single-digit hours every week outside of my main gig, time tracking just isn’t important enough to have a scary line on my card.

The rules

Since this is a system you can make your own, please remember that these are just the rules for myself at this time, rather than unbreakable laws of productivity:

1. This week’s card should be ready before Noon Monday
2. If I put something on the card, I’m committed to doing it
3. Other people can cancel a task but only rarely can I decide not to do something on the list
4. If a task isn’t done by the end of the week, it goes on the next week’s card
5. Tasks on the list shouldn’t be fluffy filler like “Go to the bathroom”
6. Tasks on the list shouldn’t be ambiguous, massive, or un-checkable
7. If something should be on the list, put it on the list
8. Check off tasks when a reasonable person would say they’re done
9. Sometimes you have to make follow-up items for a task, but don’t try to un-check stuff
10. This list is for you

The whole idea of the card and the daily tasks and the rules is to have a single little place to keep track of what I have to do. It’s a thing that exists in time and space that begs to be engaged with and has useful and darn-near fun little boxes on it.

Changes to the rules should make the system more useful or engaging or should reduce the amount of time required. You can see I’ve already written a lot about this simple system and will be writing even more paragraphs. At core, though, the system should be quick and simple. I’ve not had success with systems that have cycles and extra fields and complex prioritization and reflection/meditation/journaling built in and all that jazz. Sure, meditation could be a daily task if I decide that’s important to me, but it doesn’t belong baked into my checklist.

Nuances and variations

I think philosophically that a checklist is part of your life in a sort of narrow way, so from time to time it’s worthwhile to consider what belongs there in the context of rules 5-7. Some things you write down so they stop bouncing around your head, and these things tend not to belong on the card. Other things are captured elsewhere even if you engage with them and are accountable for them, and that’s a category worth considering.

Calendar events

If I have to be somewhere or do something at a particular time/place, I tend to put that on a calendar that then notifies me on my phone. Since my phone/computer is doing the reminding, it’s a lot less important for calendar things to be on the card. Sometimes I put important events on the card, though, especially if it’s a light week otherwise.

Full-time job tasks

My full-time job duties are a series of calendar events and items in a single project-management system for the most part. All work stuff is on its own computer and walled off from my side work and personal tasks.

When there’s a task that’s not worth making a JIRA story for but that I intend to do, I’ll sometimes put it on the card. Sometimes those tasks I’ll put on the back of the card if they’re immediate and small.

I’ve had full-time contracts lasting around 6 months in the past, and for more than one of those gigs I’d put all the tasks on the card even if they were redundant to some project management system. Maybe the difference was that I was still doing those tasks as a business rather than as an employee, or maybe the difference was that the gig was impermanent (or the client wasn’t very organized lol). I don’t know for sure why I’ve made different decisions about similar tasks, but that nuance sort of speaks to how the rules are meant to work for you rather than being ironclad.

Sidebar tasks

For a long while I had a sidebar on each card that contained topics I intended to blog about. Since the topics were long to write out each week I’d shortened them to initialisms/acronyms like ‘WACI’ for “What a component isn’t”. And even though the point of transcribing them on the list was to motivate myself to write the blog posts so I’d be able to stop transcribing them every week, I was too busy to get to blogging. Transcribing those blog topics ended up feeling like a real bummer and made me not want to fill out my card for the coming week, so I eventually made a to-do list in Google Keep for “Someday blog topics” and ditched the sidebar.

That’s not to say that a sidebar will never return or that there aren’t things worth transcribing for months until they’re done. I try to be mindful of things that drag on the system, though, since I like to enjoy the index card and checking boxes.

Notes on the back

This is both a useful part about having a scrap of paper on my desk all the time, but also something to be careful with. If I have to take a quick note it’s great. If it turns out that note has lasting value for more than a week, though, all of the sudden there’s multiple index cards on my desk. I try to think of how long my scribbles will be useful beforehand, but the easy solve if I write something with long-term value on a card is to transcribe it onto a computer somewhere so I can ditch last week’s card.

The back of a card is a great place for really short-term sub-task lists.

Consistent pen

Writing small with a really fine-tip pen is useful for this system.

I’ve never truly considered getting a really fancy pen, but that’s the kind of thing you could do if it would motivate you.

I’ve used a super fine-tip Sharpie-brand pen for years now. It bleeds a little more than I’d prefer for how small I write, but I haven’t spent any time looking for a reliable fine-tip pen that doesn’t bleed, so I just stick with what’s familiar and consistent.

Colorful cards

They sell packs of index cards in different colors. The colorful cards can be a little harder to read because the contrast ratio with black ink is lower than with a white card, but as long as the card isn’t super dark it’s probably not a problem.

One thing that’s kind of fun about a multi-color pack of index cards is that you can look forward to a few weeks from now when you switch from purple to green. It’s also a bit more noticeable to have a colorful card on a white desk.

Other markings

Sometimes when there’s a high-priority task that I should do next I circle the checkbox.

Sometimes when I’m making a card for the week and there are tasks that are related to one another I group them inside a left-side square bracket.

Sometimes when a task is canceled (by a client per rule #3!) I mark it with an x rather than a checkmark. This helps show the task shouldn’t make it onto next week’s list at a glance. For daily tasks I fail to do I leave the box blank rather than marking an x, which is kind of arbitrary but it’s my system so whatever.

Daily cards

In 2021 I was really busy with a full-time contract and lot of smaller gigs, and would do a daily version of the index card system. Considering I ended up having to walk away from that full-time contract, I’m inclined to think if I’m tempted to do daily cards I have too much going on in my life.

Juggling multiple clients

I’ve found that having a consistent format for work tasks makes it easier to scan the card. Since most of my clients use JIRA I’ll write something like “MKTG-123 Fix email header” as the card task, and then I can find all the MKTG tasks at a glance. For clients without useful ticket numbers I’ll kind of fake it like “PTS LL Refactor tabs templates”, where PTS is the client, LL is the sub-contract, and then a short description of what I have to do in order to check off that box.

Negative tasks

So far I don’t think I’ve done a daily or other task that’s like “Don’t smoke” or something. It’s kind of an interesting idea. Would definitely be interested in knowing if it works for somebody.

Make it your own

So that’s my system. If you don’t have a system or the one you’re using now has big disadvantages, please give this one a try! If you do, please let me know how it goes.

And remember that it’s your system now, so tweak it how you need.