I don’t know if you are regular/avid listeners of the Focused podcast, but the last episode was utter gold in my books. It was all about their use of calendars and really simplifying and personalizing organization and productivity stuff.
I especially liked how they are using a mixture of analog wall calendars and paper journals with digital calendars and to do lists. I think that is more of the direction I want to go in as I have found the depths of digital productivity hell and it makes me sad.
I can expand upon this later (maybe this is a blog post?), But the conclusion that I’m coming to is that the analogue in the digital are used differently. Really big picture things can go on a wall calendar (like for a year) and the few, small daily tasks can be put into a paper journal. all of the “digital brain“ stuff can and should be stored in the digital to do list and all appointments and time blocking needs to be on a digital calendar. They all serve very different goals.
A part of the show that I forgot to mention before but I really liked was they quoted Sean Blanc with his digital system being “the brain” and his analog system being “the boss”. The digital system does the heavy lifting of storing, finding and organizing things, but the more nuanced and smaller day-to-day stuff can be done in an analog fashion. I like that. I certainly haven’t really done this yet, but I think it could work.