One daily page. Plain text files. A short list of what matters most.
Everything else gets captured so it stops living in your head.
I took a Franklin Covey class in 2005 and never stopped tinkering. Paper felt honest. Digital felt flexible. I bounced between Moleskine notebooks, Obsidian vaults, and half-finished web prototypes for fifteen years.
What never changed was the daily core: a few most-important tasks at the top, and a running log of what actually happened. That simple shape has survived every tool I've tried.
Pick 1–3 things that would make today a win. I call them MITs (Most Important Tasks). Write them at the top of the page. Everything else waits.
Work the plan. When new stuff arrives — ideas, emails, requests — don't fight it. Just capture it fast so you can get back to what you already decided matters.
Timestamp what happens as it happens. Coffee at 9:15. Deep work block from 10:40–12:10. Dog walk at 1:05. Distraction at 3:22. The log isn't performance art — it's pattern detection fuel.
Whatever you care about this month — walks, push-ups, weight, sleep, water — add a tiny tracker in plain text. Easy to start, easy to drop, no guilt.
Apps lock data away. I can't grep it, diff it, or open it in 2035 without praying the company still exists. Text files open anywhere, forever. Right now mine live in:
rtm.txt — MITs + rolling taskscal.txt — calendar blockslog.txt — the day's storyfit.txt, inbox.txt, etc. — trackers and quick capturesObsidian reads them beautifully. So does VS Code, Notepad, or git. No migration nightmares later.
A couple years ago I started feeding these files to Grok. It reads the day's docket, the log, the tasks, the calendar — then does the clerical work I hate repeating.
Real questions I ask it every week:
It always asks for confirmation before writing anything. You say yes → clean entries land exactly where they belong. Telegram works too, so you can capture/log from anywhere.
Open a blank text file called docket-2026-03-05.txt (or whatever today is).
09:15 coffee + planning)That's the method. The rest (trackers, agent, GitHub integration) is optional scaffolding I added over time.
Been doing some version of this for two decades.
This is the leanest, most honest one yet.