A diary and a calendar are different things. In a diary you typically have a good bit of space to note down things that are happening/happened that day (at least this is the typical meaning in the UK). This is less true of calendars (particularly digital ones).
In the US we commonly call both of these "calendars". If we need to distinguish between the two, we'll generally use "day planner" to refer to the book you're calling a diary.
I suspect we're encountering a planning vs logging fork here. If you primarily use a daily page to log or track what you did, then terms like journal or diary seem most natural to you. If you primarily use it to plan or list what you need to do in the future, then you're more likely to call it a day planner.
HN seems more highly populated with loggers and trackers compared to the general public. A quick search on Amazon US for "day planner", "journal", and "diary" suggests most people associate journal and diary with free-form pages and day planner with date-based pages (implying most people who use date-based pages are more planners than loggers)
having 1 go-to tool / system never worked for me.. My favourite setup for years used to be plain text files which I'd use for brain dump, tasks etc. as it was flexible, simple and I owned my data. Though it had its own shortcomings and I still ended up using some other tools on top of it, not to mention the tools your team requires you to use.. Your whole information / time management setup becomes a mess very quickly.
Why not integrate these systems into 1 lightweight interface and make it collaborative and integrated? I'm trying to scratch my own itch with building https://acreom.com.
Same. My process is raw text files -> organized/revised text files -> trello (if active project tracking required) or Google docs (if shared with other people)
- Calendars are good at appointments but bad at everything else.
- Day planners are good for jotting down what you're working on and for revisiting what you did last week/month, but if you put anything with a deadline in your day planner you're bound to forget it. And if you have a ton of notes that relate to a single project, where do you put them?
- To-do lists tend to accumulate tasks and then you declare TODO bankruptcy, delete everything, and start over.
I'm convinced it's possible to merge these concepts intelligently, in a way that hasn't been done before. An app that has a free-form day planner, but you can still tag items with a due date, tags, etc so you can still see which deadlines are approaching.
You want to be able to zoom-in and zoom-out in your "tree" so you can do high level planning but you also want to be able to indent and add as many notes/ideas as you want without losing track of the bigger picture. With real-time multiuser editing and end-to-end encryption. That's what we're building with https://www.thymer.com
I've tried it a few times but it doesn't work for me because of your third point. I can't maintain a TODO list and I've always had mine grow too big. I end up having to drag 5-10 things to the next day every day after a month or so. I know it's because I'm horrible at prioritization and I do best when given a list of crap to do and can pick and choose what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it.
I use a big whiteboard calendar for my most important deadlines, bills, and appointments. I use a calendar app for recurring events. Then I use Obsidian to dump thoughts, lists, any random crap I think of that I can search through.
> I can't maintain a TODO list and I've always had mine grow too big. I end up having to drag 5-10 things to the next day every day after a month or so. I know it's because I'm horrible at prioritization and I do best when given a list of crap to do and can pick and choose what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it.
I used to have this same problem. My solution is to push items into the future if it's clear I'm not going to be able to get to them the next day. Sort of like GTD's tickler file. As long as your todo list tool allows you to add dates, you can view only items due today. That's made having a large list of tasks much easier to manage, because I only see what I have to work on today.
Honestly I sometimes think that I need a Jira backlog for real life. It's closer to a unification of todo list (that sometimes gets closed out / ignored...) and planner. Just slap a 'release calendar' on top of it and....
Sometimes I do wish the whole world was on some sort of issue tracker, and any sort of problem you could just open a ticket. (Sometimes you actually can of course, but it not being one place for everything makes it a much higher barrier, sign-up, etc.)
My experience is that those things you keep dragging to the next day again and again are one of the following:
* not actually important if you’ve been putting them off for a month
* insanely important but complicated things that need to be broken down into smaller tasks
* important things with a lot of emotional baggage attached; either hand these off to someone who will not have that, or make time to unpack that baggage - unpacking it is usually the harder option and likely to become its own constantly-deferred to-do.
It's really a shame that org-mode is constrained to Emacs (and the problems that come with that), because it really does already do most everything you mentioned here. It scratched so many itches for me - I just wasn't able to overcome (with the time I was willing to invest) various issues with performance and reliability.
Always happy to see more attempts at solving this problem.
I had tried to switch from Emacs to logseq and had massive performance issues earlier this year. I have since migrated to Obsidian, but I'm finding I really want the structure of an outliner. Obsidian is great for some types of minds, but the outliner really appeals to the way I mentally organize information, and I'm finding it's a lot of fighting the system trying to get Obsidian to work the way I want it to.
I guess I need to try logseq again - it really did have a lot of promise to be the cross-platform org-mode you mention.
Except for "multiuser real-time" part, Org-mode has everything you've mentioned and more. And the great thing that it comes with emacs ;)
Here's introduction: https://youtu.be/ZMEcb2rpauU
I do like that page that's shown in the article. It looks like it has a nice flexibility between putting meetings/events at specific times on days, blocking out periods, to-do lists that can be sketched out for the week, and a catch-all space for things without times.
Does anyone know what planners have a layout like that?
I've seen a number of day planners fairly similar, but I haven't seen any quite like that. The grids instead of lines, the combined empty space and to-dos, and the additional spaces outside the days.
I have been using this for years and I think it meets your needs. Only problem is that it is paper. I am also a fan of the compact calendar for high level events / sprints / vacation tracking.
I liked that too and was hoping to find a link to a PDF. The URLs on the page are colored so similarly to the text I could barely tell when there were links. Does anyone happen to know if that sheet is available anywhere?
I’ve ditched traditional productivity tools in favor of visual tools like Bleep (https://bleep.is) or Kinopio (https://kinopio.club). Haven’t looked since.
It’s so liberating not to have a mountain of tasks that I’ll never get to and instead enjoy time creating a visual space for things I care about.
I will try not to get too philosophical by first getting “work productivity” out of the equation. You must have tools for work productivity and maybe that’s the focus of OP.
There is the concept of “life productivity” which involves your personal projects, hobbies, your life plans, family, etc.
These are goals and aspirations which are deeply connected to your fulfillment. You can’t really put these in buckets of tasks. In fact, the mere notion of doing so sets you up for failure in many cases.
Imagine getting out of work where you look at a wall of todos to complete just to look at another. It’s exhausting and uninspiring.
By rejecting that concept and instead focusing on inspiration, curation with some level of organization and mapping you are building something something that more closely resembles your priorities and that continues to make you feel proud and happy about your past, present, and future accomplishments.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] threadHN seems more highly populated with loggers and trackers compared to the general public. A quick search on Amazon US for "day planner", "journal", and "diary" suggests most people associate journal and diary with free-form pages and day planner with date-based pages (implying most people who use date-based pages are more planners than loggers)
Why not integrate these systems into 1 lightweight interface and make it collaborative and integrated? I'm trying to scratch my own itch with building https://acreom.com.
- Calendars are good at appointments but bad at everything else.
- Day planners are good for jotting down what you're working on and for revisiting what you did last week/month, but if you put anything with a deadline in your day planner you're bound to forget it. And if you have a ton of notes that relate to a single project, where do you put them?
- To-do lists tend to accumulate tasks and then you declare TODO bankruptcy, delete everything, and start over.
I'm convinced it's possible to merge these concepts intelligently, in a way that hasn't been done before. An app that has a free-form day planner, but you can still tag items with a due date, tags, etc so you can still see which deadlines are approaching.
You want to be able to zoom-in and zoom-out in your "tree" so you can do high level planning but you also want to be able to indent and add as many notes/ideas as you want without losing track of the bigger picture. With real-time multiuser editing and end-to-end encryption. That's what we're building with https://www.thymer.com
I've tried it a few times but it doesn't work for me because of your third point. I can't maintain a TODO list and I've always had mine grow too big. I end up having to drag 5-10 things to the next day every day after a month or so. I know it's because I'm horrible at prioritization and I do best when given a list of crap to do and can pick and choose what I feel like doing when I feel like doing it.
I use a big whiteboard calendar for my most important deadlines, bills, and appointments. I use a calendar app for recurring events. Then I use Obsidian to dump thoughts, lists, any random crap I think of that I can search through.
I used to have this same problem. My solution is to push items into the future if it's clear I'm not going to be able to get to them the next day. Sort of like GTD's tickler file. As long as your todo list tool allows you to add dates, you can view only items due today. That's made having a large list of tasks much easier to manage, because I only see what I have to work on today.
* not actually important if you’ve been putting them off for a month * insanely important but complicated things that need to be broken down into smaller tasks * important things with a lot of emotional baggage attached; either hand these off to someone who will not have that, or make time to unpack that baggage - unpacking it is usually the harder option and likely to become its own constantly-deferred to-do.
Always happy to see more attempts at solving this problem.
I guess I need to try logseq again - it really did have a lot of promise to be the cross-platform org-mode you mention.
The MYN methodology comes pretty close to that for me: https://www.michaellinenberger.com/AboutMYN.html
(Don’t be put off by the marketing angle and the terminology, it’s still the best personal work task management methodology I’ve come across.)
Does anyone know what planners have a layout like that?
https://davidseah.com/node/the-emergent-task-planner/
https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
I'm in a client facing role, so my calendar ("diary") is busy. I couldn't give that up.
Obviously my inbox exists, and some things get handled straight out of there without ever hitting my inbox or my notes/todos.
Planning and executing specific tasks/deliverables is all handled in OrgMode, which is God's own to-do list.
It’s so liberating not to have a mountain of tasks that I’ll never get to and instead enjoy time creating a visual space for things I care about.
I will try not to get too philosophical by first getting “work productivity” out of the equation. You must have tools for work productivity and maybe that’s the focus of OP.
There is the concept of “life productivity” which involves your personal projects, hobbies, your life plans, family, etc.
These are goals and aspirations which are deeply connected to your fulfillment. You can’t really put these in buckets of tasks. In fact, the mere notion of doing so sets you up for failure in many cases.
Imagine getting out of work where you look at a wall of todos to complete just to look at another. It’s exhausting and uninspiring.
By rejecting that concept and instead focusing on inspiration, curation with some level of organization and mapping you are building something something that more closely resembles your priorities and that continues to make you feel proud and happy about your past, present, and future accomplishments.
Happy to chat more about this if you’d like.