The Planotes Method

I’ve had an on-again off-again relationship with planners & to-do systems. So I made my own, borrowing principles from many others. 

Planner + Notes = Planotes

And yes, I understand the pretension of naming a method this early in the game.

Without getting into too much of a preamble, here are some pieces that influenced why and how I’m going about this.

• Digital vs. paper: "according to a study conducted by Princeton’s Pam A. Mueller and UCLA’s Daniel M. Oppenheimer. Their research shows that when you only use a laptop to take notes, you don’t absorb new materials as well, largely because typing notes encourages verbatim, mindless transcription."
• Commonplace Book concept: “[A] single place where you keep ideas, quotes, inspiring thoughts, and other potentially useful information for regular review and potential re-purposing."
• Temporal vs. long term storage: I found that many things I took time & care to create & organize into Evernote were things that I’d never reference again. The input didn’t match the value.
• Attention & presence: 
• The people around me matter. I should act like it.

The Notebook

I’m using a Field Notes graph/grid pocket notebook. I’ve tried a few others (Moleskine, mostly; not the Evernote Moleskine [yet!]), but have settled on this for the time being. I’ll give the 3-pack a run and then re-evaluate.

Paper
The lightly printed grid intervals are just right: they’re small enough to accommodate intervals, as well as light enough to not distract when I’m trying to ignore them. The paper itself is thick enough for my pen to not bled through completely without being too thick. I’d like to try out the dot grid style at some point, but from what I can tell, the dots are so dark that while there’s less ink on the paper, they’re still dominant & distracting.

Durability
As far as durability goes, the cover has held up moderately well over the last month (I’m looking into reusable covers) and the middle spreads have come unstapled. I keep this in my right back pocket, so the hitch-free binding wins out over spiral-bound in comfort and durability. A major upside of the Moleskine is the stitch-binding, which I'm learning might be reason enough to go back to that notebook.

Price
Cheap enough for it to not matter when I blow through it because I put lots of things in there.

First look

On the inside cover, I’ve got some basic contact info because I tend to leave things behind in random places.Taking a page (HA) from Merlin Mann, I write “Nothing doesn’t go in here.” on the first page of every notebook. It’s a way to get myself over the “Oh, that doesn’t need to go in there” barrier before it presents itself. The thing is, whatever I could write in here isn’t as important as writing it in here. And since I’m terrible about evaluating the importance of things in the moment (aren’t we all?), it’s good to get up to and including everything.

Monthly overview

I draw my own monthly calendar. But why would I do that when there are plenty of quality, well-considered planners that have already done the difficult work of drawing lines in particular places? Because flexibility. 

 The framework of this system: 

• Monthly cycle
• Monthly planner - 1 spread
• Weekly cycle
• Weekly planner - 1 spread
• Notes - ??? spread(s)

So while I (and every other planner maker) have a couple knowns — days in a month, weeks in a month, days in a week — I can’t reliably account for the unknowns without either wasting (paying for what I don’t use) or conserving (not writing things down that I should) space in my notebook. In previous notebooks, weekly notes came in between 1 (vacation!) and 8 (research!) pages. 

Six columns, six grid units each; 5 rows (and change), five grid units each. Each weekday gets a column, and the weekend days get to share (which could be a sad commentary on the relegation of the weekend). I often get the next month started in the final row — and there’s usually some extra space below that, as you see — that helps me plan into the next month without committing to drawing the whole month before I really need it. And of course a sticky tab to quickly grab the spread. 

Weekly view

At the beginning of the week (hopefully Sunday night), I’ll draw up my week. Using the same lines I used for my monthly columns, I can easily (except on Thursdays) draw lines for my week days and again with the weekend day sharing.   

At the top of the spread, I label my day columns: initial for the day, number for the date. Leaving a handful of rows below that, I write in the hours of the day — 2 rows per hour; I often have events scheduled before & after work, but not regularly enough to set up. If something just needs to happen at any point on that date, I'll write it in the morning space with a ? instead of a time.
I write in all the things I had on my monthly calendar as well as any regular events I didn’t have on there. Once I’ve written in any fixed knowns, I can schedule the more flexible tasks of the day that I had previously marked with a ?.

Because you’re paying attention, you see a  /travel in there before my chiropractor appointment. I know I’m going to need 15 minutes to drive from my office to theirs, so I account for that here. I’ve been caught off-guard by drive times too often, so I plan for it. It’s a known.

To-dos

Some folks like to have one task list to rule them all, but that made it hard for me to discern the next best thing for me to do. Dividing tasks up by David Allen’s GTD contexts wasn’t always helpful because context (At Work) didn’t always inform what needed doing. Having read Matt Perman’s excellent What’s Best Next, I identified five roles that I regularly presume: Work, Personal, Home, Service, & Social.

Each role has a sticky note and they’re staggered so I can easily get to the right one. When I get a new task, I write it down. When I get a new major project, that’ll get a sticky of it’s own (maybe even a mini sticky).

Inevitably, I end up doing things that I hadn’t planned on doing, or I spent time in important, but more ambiguous ways (e.g., spur-of-the-moment state-of-the-work conversations, working through issues). For a long time this has worn me down — “I didn’t get anything done today!!!” — but now I’ll write those down in the segment of the day I did that and cross them off. This helps me remember those nebulous occurrences and I can begin to understand any patterns that might develop out of them.

Weekly notes

Whatever comes to mind and is possibly worth remembering.
At the end of the week, I’ll go through these notes and put anything I want to keep long-term in Evernote.

Not pictured (because new notebook): a super smart indexing system that allows me to keep track of topics & categories of notes: sermon notes, quotations, projects, and the like. Using this system depends on a reliable page-to-page grid though, which isn’t as common in the grid notebooks as the ruled notebooks.

One month in
I took these photos a month ago as a way of reminding myself to reevaluate this process in case the process broke somewhere along the way. Thankfully, I’ve been able to keep up with this pretty regularly without a whole lot of effort. When I get overwhelmed (once a week or so) & can’t keep up, it’s easy to get back on the wagon. That’s a sign of a good system. 

A major upside is that I feel I can be fully present in meetings & conversations. I’ve never liked the optics of making more eye contact with my screen than my collaborators, but this has also improved my (terrible, terrible) attention to the present. While Evernote is great for its everywhereness, there’s still something that feels too alienating to anyone around me when I pull out my phone to take a quick note. In addition, I’m wearing a watch regularly, so I’m pulling out my phone a lot less.

All told (or read, in your case), this has become a surprisingly important & helpful tool in maintaining any sort of sanity for myself. It’ll change over time, I’m sure, but I hope this helps someone else out there. If it’s helpful to you or you have suggestions, shoot me a line at hello {dot} hilker {at} gmail

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This was originally posted on my website, tylerhilker.com