A few of the key things that you will need as you need as a professional are the ability to manage tasks, understand how you spend your time, and improve your own processes. For me and many others, journaling, task managers, and time trackers help you answer these important questions.
What is Journaling?
Journaling is a reflective process which aims to capture tasks, observations, ideas, and lessons in order to be able to recall and learn from them. Tasks something actionable that needs to be done. Observations describe what happened – akin to a lab journal. Ideas are more unspecific to be processed later. Lastly I record Lessons. Lessons record what was needed to accomplish something hard that I want to share with others.
Journaling allows you to process the world at a slower pace. Processing the world slower helps you to make more deliberate decisions, and to recognize patterns so you can act differently into the future.
My current approach to journaling is based on two key sets of ideas:
What Are The Key Components?
What you journal and how you journal are deeply personal. Here are a few of the high level takeaways for me:
First, treat your journal as an append only log. This is a key idea from bullet journaling. For me, journaling is most useful when I can record ideas without having to devote substantial amounts of thought to it. The more friction that there is to journaling, the less that I do it, and the less that I derive value from it. Now you may ask, “if the journal is append only, and everything is jumbled together, how can you ever find anything?” the answer is the second key take-away.
Second, periodically distill and reflect on your journal. In these reflections, you sort through your notes and tasks to organize what is actually important into more permanent homes. To emphasize this, bullet journaling recommends doing this with paper journals, because it requires effort to physically copy things from one journal to another, and you have limited space rather than mere copy and paste. Bullet journaling recommends a daily, weekly, and monthly reflection. For me, I do a daily reflection, and other reflections as needed. From Building a Second Brain, I learned the trick of progressive summarization which is to first go back and underline things that where important, and when you do you next “level” of reviews, review everything that was underlined and highlight the most important subset. This key practice of reviewing things periodically helps you actual derive value from your notes.
The larger the period of the reflection, the more substantial the reflection:
- daily: what did I do today, what should I do tomorrow, what connections should I make?
- weekly: what is important this week? What was important from last week? What should I schedule?
- monthly: what should I stop, start, and continue doing for next month? Are my habits helpful and effective?
- seasonally: what are my vision/theme/aspirations for this season? How well did I live up to the aspirations for last season? What from this journal is worth migrating to the next?
Types Of Journal Entries
Once you get accustomed to journaling, here are some of the other ways that I use my journal (several are taken from bullet journaling).
- Daily Log – the append only log that I mentioned earlier
- Topic Spreads – list of related things currated during my monthly review. I have ones for packing list, recipes, etc… ; The key thing is to create these as needed, and not in anticipation.
- Mind Maps – a spatial way to organize information which can be thought of as an alternative to an outline. I prefer it to brain storming because it doesn’t require me to fill the page in order, allowing me to revisit topics as I think of them.
- Habit Tracking – a simple set of checklists for each day that I use to track key habits that I want to keep: exercise, bible reading, and journaling. You could of course make your own list.
- Kanban List – a collection of tasks organized into blocked, new, in-progress, done, and backlog. Commonly used in software development to keep track of projects.
What Is Task Management?
In addition to journaling, I also use a task management system. Tasks need to be managed or they often are left undone or done without respectfully to priority which can hurt your longer term goals. The task management system is a consistent view of all of the tasks that I need to do rather than the journal which is a strict super-set of this information. In fact, when I travel, there is a page in my journal that I create before the trip with all of the tasks to be done – this is my task manager. When I am at home, I keep this information on a large whiteboard near my desk – this is my task manager. Call me old school, but I like the tactile feel of moving tasks across my board or checking them off my list.
What goes in the task manager? The so-called “Eisenhower Square” named for the former US president and general is a good guide. The Eisenhower square divides tasks along two axis: “urgent and not urgent” and “important and not important”. Tasks that are urgent must be done immediately or as soon as possible. Tasks that are important help you meet your broader goals and objectives. His advice then goes: A task that is urgent and important should be done immediately, A task that is urgent, but not important should be delegated if possible, A task that is not urgent, but important should be scheduled, and A task that is neither urgent nor important should be discarded.
When recording a task you need to record enough to make it SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.
- Specific – can you remember what it is unambiguously?
- Measurable – how will you know when it is done?
- Attainable – can you can actually possibly accomplish this? You won’t always know before hand but try to think this part through beforehand.
- Relevant – how is the task related to your broader goals and themes?
- Timely – what is the deadline or deadlines needed for this task if any?
This information can help you determine know how a task fits into your larger goals as well as when and how it should be done.
Within my task manager, I have 5 key statuses:
- Blocked – I am waiting on something or someone to do something
- New – a task that needs to be done soon, but I haven’t started yet
- In Progress – a task that I have started. I try to limit this to 1-3 tasks to keep focused and avoid context switching.
- Done – tasks completed recently so I can see my progress each week.
- Backlog – things that I would like to do someday, maybe.
Together journaling and task management provide a structure that enables good task management. The journal helps you reflect on the why of your tasks and what you learned along the way. The task manager gives you a single place to look at for all that you need to do.
Time tracking
The last key part of this trio of tools is time tracking. This is how you can measure what you actually did which enables meaningful retrospective. When I review my time spent, I try to think where was the time spent, spent where you would have liked to have spent it? Why or why not did that happened? What could be automated/delegated?
There are various tools and ways to do this. The tools can be automatic or manual. Manual time tracking is straightforward – just log it in your journal (or in another tool) as you do things through out the day. Automatic time tracking tools use things like which applications were on screen and/or focused at through out the day. These tools often require a set of rules to tell the tracking program what each task actually was. You maybe surprised where you actually spend your time each week. The best tools give you good ways to visualize how your time was spent as a summary. I encourage you to try it at least for one whole week and see where you spend your time. Where you spend your time reveals a lot about what you really value.
One closing thought here on both time tracking and task management. In the words of David Sparks and Mike Schmitz a pair of podcasters who I thought put it well, “life is about more than cranking widgets”. The goal of these tools is not to enable you to do more – they probably will –, but to better steward the gift of the time that you have been given. Working on an endless productivity grind while initially satisfying, can never, and will never truly satisfy you. Work, stuff, accomplishments, pleasure, knowledge, wisdom – all of this will eventually pass away and you will be forgotten. Use these tools to make time for what is truly important.
- Try tracking your time for a week to the nearest 15 minutes. What does it reveal about your preferences and focuses? Does it match your goals for where you spend your time? What granularity of time tracking is useful to you?
- Consider adopting a journaling system such as “building a second brain” or “bullet journaling” for 2 weeks.
- Consider the tasks in your task manager, are the tasks SMART and if not, what details do you tend to not include? why?
Tools
People often ask me what tools they should use for this. I suggest that people start with paper and pen/pencil – I did for years and often still do. It’s cheap and infinitely flexible. The important thing about these tools is that they help you and don’t get in the way.
I do however now use some software and tools for specific things:
- Drafts - iOS quick notes when I am away from my desk
- Reminders - iOS location based reminders, time based reminders, mostly my “personal” backlog
- GoodNotes - iOS used and like, just had problems syncing large journal files
- Vim + VimWiki – My favorite text editor, I sync it using a cloud file syncing service
- Tasks – I currently use a whiteboard
- Calendar – I use Google Calendar for home, and Microsoft 365 Calendar for work.
- ActivityWatch – Cross platform automatic time tracking tool
I hope this helps!
Changelog
- 2023-01-22 – Created