My last post covered how I’ve been Organizing my Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly activities. In this post I’ll go over how I organize and track my day.
I keep a note titled Daily Execution in Evernote. Every morning, I review my Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly note to check what’s in the calendar for the day ahead of me. I look for things that have to happen at a set time (such as a meeting) as well as things that have to happen on this day, but not at a specific time.
This is a template of what my Daily Execution note looks like:
I try not to pollute this note with too much information. If I have a meeting, I create a note for that meeting, put all the details I need in there, and then just add a link to it on my Daily Execution note. If the meeting is a place I have to drive to, I’ll add the address to the note, so I can easily tap on it on my phone and pull up directions. If it’s a phone call, I put the phone number on the note, so I can simply tap on it on my phone.
This note is my single source of truth for my day. It needs to give me a clear idea as to what I need to do on this day, and it needs links to other notes with further information about those things.
I check this note several times all day long.
Many times I’m checking it on my phone, so I try to make it easy to look up information I need.
As the days go by, I jot down quick notes on things I just did. I use vJournal on my Mac or iPhone for that:
vJournal keeps a note in Evernote with timestamps for everything logged that day:
The iOS version of vJournal also adds location information to the note. I like that because sometimes I’m driving by some place and I see something I want to check out later (for instance, a stakepark I didn’t know of). Logging that info to vJournal allows me to easily find out when I saw the place and where it was so I can go back there later.
At the end of the day, I review my Daily Execution note, as well as the note created by vJournal. I verify what I had to do that got done and what didn’t get done, and create new tasks, calendar entries, etc, accordingly.
Once I’m done reviewing that information, a copy all of the content in my Daily Execution note, paste it at the bottom of my note created by vJournal, tag it with “daily log”, rename the note to follow the format YYYY-MM-DD (which allows me to quickly find my log for a specific day), and move the note into a Archive notebook.
For the records, I started using the approach of having a single Daily Execution note about two years ago. The approach of keeping a daily log I’ve started all the way back in 2010 (as of today, I have 2349 notes tagged “daily log”)!!
As far as keeping a daily log like that, I can’t tell you how helpful it has been. I’m often going back to it to help recompose my memory on things I’ve done, people I’ve met, places I’ve been, ideas I’ve had, etc.
I’ve been changing how I do these things slightly over the years, trying new things out, but the basic idea has been sticking around and it works well for me.
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