Plain Text Productivity System

productivity.md

Plain Text Productivity System

Goals

• Everything should be in plain text, using the markdown format, to ensure maximum portability.
• The style should mimic bullet journal to and it easy to import written notes.
• Files should live in cloud drive, like Dropbox or OneDrive.
• Grep-ability.

Structure

Files are created for each day and placed into a directory that corresponds to the year.

personal-log/
	2020/
		2020-08-01.md
		2020-08-02.md
	2021/
		2021-09-01.md
		2021-09-02.md

Assuming files are only created on week days, there will be roughly 260 files in this folder by the end of the year.

The name ensures consistent sorting.

Each file has the same structure.

# YYYY-MM-DD

## Yesterday

- [x] Something that was done.
- [x] Enhancement.  JIRA-1235

## Today

- [ ] Something to do today. 

## To Do

- [ ] Something to do
- [ ] Something else to do by 2021-11-01 for project-abc
- [ ] Bug to fix. JIRA-1234
- [ ] Some new feature. JIRA-456
	- [ ] Implement feature 
  - [ ] Write tests
  - [ ] Document changes 
- [ ] @John.  Something that was delegated to someone else

## Some other topic

- Meeting notes and other topics can live after the top two sections. 

Methodology

1. Each morning, copy the previous day’s log into an entry for today.
2. Replace the notes in Yesterday with yesterday’s completed tasks.
3. Move the 3 most important tasks from the To Do section into Today.

Tips

• To-Dos should be written as outcomes. You check off the task when the outcome has been reached.
• Projects are outcomes that will take several steps to reach, and should be managed separately. Tasks from projects should be copied into the daily log.
• The other topics section can be used as a place to incubate projects.
• Keep the files in a place where they will automatically be backed up to more than one device like Dropbox or OneDrive.