Hi Marius,

actually this article got me really interested in bullet journaling but I also read that you no longer use it. What is your current method instead?

For me, I started with OmniFocus (I know, could have picked something easier) and went into GTD heads-first. For a few weeks it went great but after a while fatigue kicked in and “today tasks” took longer and longer to accomplish.

I switched to easier apps (namely Things, and now The Hit List) which helped me a ton with keeping track of what I want to do and when, but to the core it comes down to actually doing things. I noticed for myself that a big source of why I am not “getting things done” is because of distractions we tend to automatically seek as soon as a task is getting into unpleasent / annoying terretory.

The main source of distractions (at least for me) is, well, my phone and my macbook. It’s so easy to get distracted by virtually anything: Notifications, an app I wanted to try, a website I drifted into (this one for example) or even that Desktop that needs some cleaning because files are old and suddenly I feel like implementing an automated system to get rid of these files automatically which eats up another week.

I noticed for me that having things offline worked… pretty good actually! Uninstalling Facebook, Twitter — blocking domains on a network level and lately even wanting to just leave my phone at home. But the problem is: My todolist is digital. In GTD style I dump my entire head into the inbox and organize it from there. Having an app doing that for me is forcing me to go into the digital realm (aka starting my macbook / phone), and once in there it is very easy to get sidetracked. This is not necessarily a question of self-management but also fault of apps being engineered to be as addictive as possible.

So I want to try paper ‘the right way’. As a former BulletJournal user, would you recommend it to a digital guy like me? Were there other things (frameworks, tools) you noticed on your journey that are worth mentioning?