Oct 2, 2016
Basic Principles
NotePlan was made, because the existing todo and calendar tools don’t focus on daily planning with actual dates, but either accumulating big lists of points or managing events. The general principle is the digital version of the Moleskin calendars/diaries, where you have an empty page for every day. You are free to enter events such as meetings or birthdays, but you could also enter todos with bullet points to check off. It’s very flexible and could support many workflows.
The second principles is translated from the ‘Bullet Journal’. This is a system and template to plan your days, weeks, months and years using nothing else than a normal notebook and a pen. You structure everything in different bullets and mark them appropriately. NotePlan works similar, but much simpler.
Markdown
In NotePlan the flexibility and simplicity of writing in a diary or notebook is translated into the digital world using Markdown. Since Markdown doesn’t required a user interface, it is extremely extendable. I analysed my own workflow from the pen and paper approach and took over the most common marks I have used:
Markdown already supported marking todos as done, but I also needed to schedule or postpone tasks (mostly pushing them from today to tomorrow or some other day in the week, because I couldn't finish it). Another important mark is ‘cancel’. Often I get new ideas on what needs to be done, but later I recognise I don’t really have to do it after all. For documentation purpose I won’t cut it out, but mark as cancelled.
