I’ve found that day planning can be a pretty useful habit to adopt at the start of your day. Helps with those moments where one’s mind is all over the place, unsure on what to focus on.

I started doing a very lightweight way of day planning. It ideally lasts only for the day you write it, but has mechanisms to track tasks for some days beyond. I don’t write a day plan every day. Only on days where I have small goals in my head I want to achieve and don’t want to forget.

I personally do it on a physical paper notebook, but tools with a journal support like Logseq or Obsidian are similarly useful, as long as you can access them when you sit down to start your day.

Logseq is good for simple checklists and it’s easy to write a query to keep track of incomplete or postponed tasks. Obsidian has a Day planner plugin that even helps visualize a timeline, useful for time blocking. Time blocking however is beyond the scope of this entry.

On to the actual technique

First, I write out today’s date in a header. I format it as "= YYYY-MM-DD". Underneath, add a checkbox item for every thing that I set out to accomplish that day. Usually a max of 5 tasks or so is realistic for me, unless some of them are really minor tasks.

Then, simply check off the items as I go about my day and complete them.

If the day ends with some uncompleted items, I review them at the start of the next day. I put a red ”>” sign beside every incomplete task from past days, and append another for every day that the task remains incomplete.

When a task accumulates more than four or five >‘s it probably means it’s not urgent enough. At that point I either discard it, or move it to my main todo list to avoid forgetting about it.