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Comment by BonoboIO | Hacker News Reader

Going back from ToDo-Lists in Apps to simple paper and tick mark them.

I have tried and failed to follow the GTD philosophy many times. After a while, I too went with a simple checklist. I can indent that list with sub-tasks, but that's it.

Mark as checked if it's completed. Leave as it is if it's not and come back to it the next day. Kinda refreshing.

Check out Bullet journaling. It's a simple checklist plus one or two other "tick types" that's quite helpful.

GTD => BuJo convert here.

I’m a believer. I started BuJo’ing 6 months ago and feel totally liberated. I haven’t skipped a day and life is. Way. Better.

I tried adopting the standard Bujo symbols, but they weren't intuitive to me. i.e.

⋅ = task, ⊙ = in-progress, × = completed.

I replaced them with my own, which to me made more sense.

◯ = task, ◐ = in-progress, ● = completed.

The ones I use are:

  [ ] - task
  [/] - in progress
  [x] - completed
  [-] - canceled
  [|] - moved to next day / another time

This is all with pen and paper, of course, with the [ ] being boxes. Once something is marked in-progress, I can still mark it completed, canceled, or moved by just adding another line.

This makes much more sense. How do you move from in-progress to canceled or moved though? If you do a horizontal/vertical strikethrough, doesn't that create a new symbol which look like completed upon glancing?

With the standard Bujo symbols, you can't really move from in-progress to completed without a making a completely new mark. Also, I need more visual differentiation than just tiny dots so I can scan a page of bullets quickly.

> doesn't that create a new symbol which look like completed upon glancing?

Well, not if you make your diagonals hit the corners and your verticals/horizontals hit the sides/top/bottom. In ASCII, they look like they're contained inside, but I actually make the lines cross the box border. For multiple contiguous items that I'm moving, I may even just make a single line to cross multiple boxes. I'm trying to reduce over-committing, though.

I've gone hybrid for todo lists. Handwritten in GoodNotes on iPad. Seems to give me the best of both worlds - better memory retention that comes from physically writing stuff down, but with search and copy/paste functionality.

Hear hear. I do bullet journaling with a pocket-sized softcover moleskin. The notebook lives in my back pocket and it's definitely way better than any app I've ever used.

+100 for https://bulletjournal.com/

Likewise. If you want the "advanced" version, put each item on a tiny sticky and arrange the stickies in a file folder.

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