How Writing To-Do Lists Helps Your Brain
Over the years, I've tried many digital to-do lists, including one I wrote myself. Today, I just use a notebook.<p>The trick that I made work is to have two to-do lists: daily and quarterly.<p>For daily, it's simple. I have a variation of the Bullet Journal [1], but interleaved with meeting notes, ideas, etc.<p>But many ideas are bigger than what you can accomplish/benchmark on a daily basis. For those, I have two pages per quarter that I fill with "quarterly goals". I try to keep the list under 20-30 items and keep them high-level. Every week, I look at the same two pages and make sure that I am making progress toward them. If not, I go back to my daily notes and see if I worked on the right stuff the previous week. This is a variation on the idea that I stole from Aaron Levie [2].<p>For me, the tactile/tangible nature of paper note-taking, as well as its flexibility in formatting, has been incredibly useful.<p>[1] <a href="http://bulletjournal.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bulletjournal.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/3021586/most-productive-people-box-aaron-levie" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastcompany.com/3021586/most-productive-people-b...</a>