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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

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.

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