My day is full of context switches, meetings with varying scopes, pending tasks to go through and desperate attempts to clean the email inbox. Rare are the days when I wrap up my working day with an empty to-do list. It is a big challenge to keep things running smooth. Keeping a daily journal is essential for me to get things done and have a sustainable work-life integration.

Beside my public blog, I maintain a private journal and write daily. Over the years it has proven to be the most helpful tool to me in personal and professional growth.

My Daily Journal and To-Do Lists

Typically my daily entry would consist of the happenings of my day and I’d close it with a reflection. I would usually have a dedicated time slot where I’d sit down to write, typically in the evenings.

I also had two To-Do lists, one for personal items and one for work. I was mostly relying on the GTD methodology to move forward on pending items.

Trade-offs

This worked fine for a few years, however there were several trade-offs with this approach:

1. Maintaining two separate to-do list proved to be counterproductive. I eventually ended up with competing priorities between personal and work items. This resulted to even more procrastination and the queue of the things I had to do was rapidly growing.
2. Unstructured thoughts in the journal started to be a bottlneck when it came to reflecting, analyzing learnings and finding patterns to work on.
3. Having a dedicated time slot for writing did not work for me. I’d find myself procrastinating to write, was too tired and didn’t have time.

Chance for optimization

Ultimately I had the following goals in mind when looking for optimization in the above mentioned routine:

1. Focus on the most important and relevant things, remove the need of prioritizing across two different to-do lists.
2. Write in increments during the day, as soon as it is possible and there is anything relevant to write down.
3. Organize notes in a way to be able to pull out learnings in a structured way.

What do I do now

Tooling

The first thing I did was to find the right tool for the problem. I opted-in for https://obsidian.md. Obsidian gives me everything I need - I can tag notes, build connections between notes and have a graph view over it (mind map), persist notes on my local disk (or Dropbox) and have all the flexibility for configuring the app the way I want. Check out the feature set for more.

I also enabled the Daily Notes plugin, which allows to create daily entries easily and customize the format the way I want. Here is what it looks like:

The plugin allows me to have my own template to structure the note the way I want.

Daily Entry Template

The template I use consists of the following headers:

1. Today
2. This week / Next week
3. Things that happened
4. Further Thoughts
5. Learnings
6. Mood

Today

This is essentially my to-do list for the current day. I try to cap the number of items to 5-6, from both work and non-work related backlog of items. I don’t prioritize items in this bucket - the goal is to accomplish all at the end of the day. Thus the tasks need to be clear and doable within one day.

This week / Next week

Same as above, but for the week.

Things that happened

This is the space where I write down my thoughts and happenings during the day. One key difference from the previous one is that I do it continuously.

The insights I gain after I reflect on what I write is quite interesting. For example, I can see how my productivity and mood changes during the day and how consistent the changes are.

Further thoughts

Here I really just talk to myself. It is a place for ideation, thinking big things and looking into the future.

Learnings

Typically I write down my learnings in the evening. Learnings can be anything - some afterthought from a conversation with a stranger, or insights I gained reading a book.

Mood

I do my best when I am in the best mood. Keeping track of my mood theme during the day helps me to analyze and understand the areas where I could do better, or which impact my day most.

Wrapping up

Very happy with Obsidian and the routine I set up so far, I don’t have enough data yet, but can definitely see progress over the last couple of months in many directions, to summarize:

1. I do write more
2. I get more things done
3. I am not looking for a new tool every other week

Happy writing!