New Diary/Activity Template

A few months ago I came across an adapted version of the Chronotebook, at The Geekette Speaketh. The Muji Chronotebook won an international design award in 2007, and is a very intriguing concept for a day planner. The Geekette adaptation is still around capturing the whole day, and I was thinking about how this might be adapted into a work day solution.

I used to try to do the GTD thing, but I didn't find that it fitted in my brain. So I thought I could include a bit of a to do list with it as well. What I came up with is below, with an example of how I use it beside.

 

• The concept is that the very inner circle would be what you need to focus on for the day - if there is a particular focus. 
• The next circle is your diary, where you put in your meetings and any scheduled time that you have allocated for particular tasks. I'm not all that good at ensuring that I have scheduled my work, but I'm trying to work on that.
• The outer circle is what you actually did during the day. I'm not entirely dogmatic about this, since I have the sort of job where I am constantly interrupted with short phone calls, questions and quick to answer emails it would be difficult to really capture everything. So there are sometimes gaps in things, or I just include it in the big chunk of work I'm doing.
• The last part of the circle is for reminders for the day - either for the start or end of the day.
• Below the diary/activity circle is a brief To Do List for the day. I've bought in a little of the GTD-type thoughts of classifying the activities a little bit, but I really don't find it onerous to bring tasks over to the next day if I have to.

I find that it is working quite well for me. I did a trial run with single pages and it worked quite well so I have made a bound journal with the pages now.

If you have any ideas about how to improve this I'm happy to hear it. If you're interested in using it yourself then feel free to download the PDF A4 document (which has two images, since they are A5).