While cleaning up my bookshelf early in the year, I rediscovered an old notebook. A company I used to work with had sent it to me as a gift almost a decade ago. Inside I found an old but efficient productivity system. It must have been what I settled on after trying several more elaborate setups, like Getting Things Done and others.
The system was really as simple as it gets: For every day, I’d write the date, a dash, and then the tasks I aspired to complete, all in one row. Whatever was done, I’d cross off with horizontal lines. If I didn’t finish a task, I left it for the next day. And whenever I abandoned a task deliberately, either because it wasn’t necessary or I’d left it undone for too long, I crossed it out with squiggly lines to mark it’s “not done” status.
The next day, I’d repeat the same process in the row below, and so on. I never went beyond one row for a day to ensure I didn’t create a list longer than what I could realistically handle. If a row was full, chances were, my day was, too.
The earliest entries go back to late 2016. “24.12.16 – Summary, Newsletter, Inbox 0, Presents.” It didn’t matter if the task was professional or personal. All major doings which would take more than a few minutes went on there.
As I leafed through the notebook, I noticed it was mostly empty. I had only filled nine pages with my system. Upon closer inspection, however, I realized those nine pages equated to most of 2017. Since I only needed one row per day, each page could hold 20-25 days’ worth of tasks. I had captured 10 months of work on five tiny sheets of paper. Wow!
It’s not like I wasn’t using paper to handle some of my to-dos when I found the notebook. I’d only briefly tried digital-only in the past, and whatever needed doing now always disappeared. A post-it on your virtual desktop is nice, but if you never look at said desktop because you’re lost in your browser, it doesn’t do the job. But the paper I was using was literally trash.
After moving in 2023, I thought, “Why make it complicated? Just grab a piece of paper from a letter you’d throw away anyway, write down some mid-term milestones, and call it a day.” As I write this, I have the cardboard cover of a burrata I ate two years ago next to me. Around half the milestones scribbled on it are crossed off. I have nothing against these small scraps floating around, but they rarely help me day-to-day. So the notebook’s 160 or so empty pages seemed like the perfect invitation.
It’s been just under a month. One page down. 24 rows. Many more to go. The system still works.
Why did I pick it up again? For one, it’s an invisible fight. I didn’t separate with the company that gifted the notebook to me on good terms. How nice to get one more thing out of the relationship, and for that thing to prove I’m doing well without them. More importantly, however, I imagined the notebook being full. How many decades of work might I be able to fit in there? It already feels amazing to turn those first nine pages. I want to turn the rest of them with the same sense of accomplishment—and I want to hold the books in my hand that those filled pages should turn into.
What’s your system? Think about it. It needn’t be complicated. For me, simple did the job 10 years ago. And simple still does the job today. Back to paper it is—and there’s nothing wrong with that.
