Write down the day ahead of you

I'm just sharing a neat little trick I've setup for myself to keep myself focused on what I should do during the day, or at least help keep myself focused.

I have one of these notepads, that don't really count as notepads. You can rip off each page and the pages are held together by a red plastic which was once sticky but is now dry. If you don't get what I'm talking about just think of it as any other small notepad.

What I'm doing is, I wake up, I turn computer on, and before doing anything else I write down in this notepad, in one page usually, what I gotta do for the day. So I write at the top in big letters the title of the subject, like if a client is named "Bob" I write in big letters "Bob" at the top.

Then I make a list of the stuff that I have to do. I separate each item with a dash (-) and I leave like 1 or 2 centimeters of space to the left of the dash (for Americans and UK people that's around 1 inch). This space is in order to be able to communicate stuff to myself with symbols. Little bit on that later.

So here's a list of stuff that I wrote for myself for my client's site:

Bob:

- performance meta 'title'
- fix videos centering
/ homepage SEO

Add that extra space to the left of the dashes yourself.

So what this means for me is that there are reminders, two of them are todo and one of them is done. - is todo, / is done.

That's it. That's all I do and it keeps me on track. And if I think of stuff to add to this, I just do. And I do it by least time-consuming to most time-consuming. At the end of the day I just rip this page off, or scroll to the next one, if there's something leftover I write in the page for tomorrow. This of course can be done, before or after sleeping. I tend to do before, but after works just as well I find.

Now, one thing with this is that you do NOT need to detail exactly what you want to do. Just little reminders that tell you what you need to do. Preferably make it one-liners.

So what's with the space to the left? That's just for symbols. I'll explain.

If I'm working on that or I got some part of it done but I need to stop for whatever reason, I add a .. This tells me I started on it but didn't finish. If I later start again I add a |.

You get the idea, you can use any symbol you like, I just like using symbols that make sense for me, use symbols that make sense for you.