While your system doesn’t have to include a Day-Timer, it should contain a series of steps you’ve committed to on a daily basis. It’s a habit. If opening a planner, or popping open an app is a barrier to your daily time management system, then you haven’t made that commitment.

While your system doesn’t have to include a Day-Timer, it should contain a series of steps you’ve committed to on a daily basis. It’s a habit. If opening a planner, or popping open an app is a barrier to your daily time management system, then you haven’t made that commitment.

If money were no object, I’ve often lusted after a largish LCD panel (say 37″) above my desk that would do nothing except display my to-do list. Living in the real world, as I do until that lottery win turns up, this will remain a wishful fantasy.

I do have a day-book but don’t find it effective as a to-do list, not so much because it’s closed, but because I don’t have the discipline to re-write a to-do list each day, transposing any uncompleted tasks and bringing down new ones from a master\scheduled list.

Interestingly I did have a very good solution about 10 years ago – a Psion 5. It was always open on my desk (or always about my person when not at my desk) and fulfilled the job of carrying forward tasks, bringing down new tasks/scheduled tasks brilliantly. In fact, looking back I’m not entirely sure why it fell into disripute. Probably because phones started to have calendars on and so I started carrying that instead and possibly because I started using desktop applications which were more sexy and benefited from a proper screen & keyboard.

When netbooks first came out, I got one of the first eeePCs thinking this would fulfill the gap left by the demise of the Psion 5 but I’ve just never really found the to-do list software that quite worked the way I do (I’ve toyed with the idea of turning it into a Hackintosh just so I could run Omnifocus) and, in reality, despite being small they just are quite the right form factor like the Psion 5 was to carry as a ubiquitous capture tool.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I should have a look on eBay – I bet there’s still Psion 5′s available on there.

HC.

If money were no object, I’ve often lusted after a largish LCD panel (say 37″) above my desk that would do nothing except display my to-do list. Living in the real world, as I do until that lottery win turns up, this will remain a wishful fantasy.

I do have a day-book but don’t find it effective as a to-do list, not so much because it’s closed, but because I don’t have the discipline to re-write a to-do list each day, transposing any uncompleted tasks and bringing down new ones from a masterscheduled list.

Interestingly I did have a very good solution about 10 years ago – a Psion 5. It was always open on my desk (or always about my person when not at my desk) and fulfilled the job of carrying forward tasks, bringing down new tasks/scheduled tasks brilliantly. In fact, looking back I’m not entirely sure why it fell into disripute. Probably because phones started to have calendars on and so I started carrying that instead and possibly because I started using desktop applications which were more sexy and benefited from a proper screen & keyboard.

When netbooks first came out, I got one of the first eeePCs thinking this would fulfill the gap left by the demise of the Psion 5 but I’ve just never really found the to-do list software that quite worked the way I do (I’ve toyed with the idea of turning it into a Hackintosh just so I could run Omnifocus) and, in reality, despite being small they just are quite the right form factor like the Psion 5 was to carry as a ubiquitous capture tool.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I should have a look on eBay – I bet there’s still Psion 5′s available on there.

HC.