Ask HN: What’s your favorite tool for planning your day?

Trello. Lanes with titles Backlog, Tomorrow, Today, Doing, Blocked, Tracking and Done

After reading the other comments I feel very low-tech but I'm using Apple's Calendar and Reminders apps, synced though iCloud.

I get notifications on my devices including my watch, I can manage entries via Siri when I'm driving, and it can detect appointments from my text messages and emails. I don't think I'd want to give any of that up.

(I also make intensive use of Apple Notes, which I really love.)

+1

- Their free service is fantastic (though I've upgraded)

- My wife and I coordinate tasks easily with it

I've been building my own thing for a while.

It blends the hierarchical navigation of Workflowy (to figure out your priorities) with task management and routine building.

Throughout this process, I discovered a whole lot about ADHD. It turns out that's why I've chased this with such reckless abandon.

Between the internal pressure and balancing the side effects of medication, I burnt out. I'm _slowly_ climbing my way out of that hole.

Three days ago, I found a handful of test users by leaving a Reddit comment; I figured I could build on that by trying again here.

If you're interested to try/test the software I call 'My Second Brain' (the one that works), lemme know.

The Daily Activity Schedule by psychiatrist Dr. David Burns in his book Feeling Good is the main technique I use, and the current software I use to type it out is OneNote. The main idea is to create a three-column table with the time of day in the left-most column; an hourly schedule as the middle “Prospective” column; and an hourly log of what you actually did in the right-hand “Retrospective” column with a score of 1-5 of how you rate your feelings of “Mastery” or “Pleasure” with the task.

The main benefits I’ve found are that I know when my meetings are; I can visualize the time requirements of certain activities on the rest of the schedule (so it’s harder to put a hard task vaguely off until the evening, as it requires a fixed number of blocks); and I can improve motivation of doing challenging tasks (associating the mastery score with enjoyment of completing challenging tasks). The original technique is described in Burns’s book “Feeling Good,” and a summary found via Google search is here (visualization of the table is at the bottom of the article) [0].

I found OneNote better than Excel for implementing this, as the application feels easier to use for quick reference and edits (the table opens up in large font, without needing to Zoom in for Excel as not too many cells are used). I keep copies of past schedules in Excel though, in case I want to analyze it in the future. For capturing tasks, I use Things 3 for to-dos and Google Calendar for events.

I actually did try Plan in SuperMemo software, mentioned by the original post. While I liked the concept, I found it unwieldy to open and edit (as SuperMemo is primarily a flashcard, or more formally spaced repetition, app), and the program is only developed for Windows PCs (though it looks like there is some support for Linux).

[0] https://sourcesofinsight.com/how-to-use-a-daily-activity-sch...