I struggled for years to organize myself with daily list apps that were typed. Finally I realized that since typed lists look uniform, I cannot “see” them. I kept forgetting things, even though it felt like I was rereading my typed lists all the time.

Handwriting my daily lists was the game-changer. I like paper and pen for my daily list because it helps me stay focused, but there are also plenty of interesting digital options for using handwriting in your thinking and planning — no paper required.

Most of my personal productivity information is digital. I keep an online calendar and a digital master task list. However, every time I’ve tried to use daily to-do list apps, I forgot things even when they were on my list. I’m a visual thinker and I need strong visual cues to organize myself.

One of my frustrations with daily lists on an app is that I had to reread the whole list, every time, to figure out what was going on. Even with apps that let you focus on one day, most people remember things better when we can handwrite them rather than type them.

Why Visual Thinkers Struggle with To-Do List Apps

Linear lists like we typically see in productivity apps force a kind of sequential order that may not be the best way to think through your day. The brilliant Donella Meadows discussed the importance of visuals when it comes to understanding dynamic situations* where you need to be aware of many things at once (like, ohhhh for example, everything going on with your day today):

…there is a problem in discussing systems only with words. Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously. To discuss them properly, it is necessary somehow to use a language that shares some of the same properties as the phenomena under discussion. Pictures work for this language better than words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once. (Meadows 2008, p 5)

With a handwritten list, organized with a few lines and symbols, you can glance at it rather than read it, and still know exactly what is going on. Visual thinkers might need something that works less like a sequential list and more like a holistic map.

By using a few symbols and lines, it’s quicker to scan and update handwritten lists. And the process of making drawings, diagrams or symbols in the first place also helps us think.**

Also, your interests and needs evolve. The nice thing about handwriting your daily list is that you can change things up any time without having to learn a whole new app.

Does handwriting a list take more time? It depends. How much time do you spend fiddling with your daily task list app? It takes me less time to make and update a handwritten daily list than it did to sort and check and uncheck and re-categorize and update and read and then reread (because I kept losing my place!) a digital task list.

Here are a couple of simple, visually-oriented ways to plan out your day so you can see at a glance what is going on.

Make a Context Map to Help You Scan Your Day at a Glance

David Allen, in Getting Things Done, talks about the importance of organizing your tasks*** by context: in other words, divide your list by the tools you need to have, or the situations you need to be in, to do those tasks.

For example, parts of my job must be done at my physical workplace. Other parts of my job must be done on a computer, but what matters is not the location, but whether or not I have my laptop. So I can map out my task list by what needs to be done in different situations, or contexts. This is a list I can easily scan, because if I am not in a given context — that is, if I am not at my workplace — I don’t have to read anything in that section.

I learned this map system years ago from a woman who was getting her Ph.D. while holding down a demanding full-time job and raising her school-aged kids. I used her technique when I was in grad school, also with a job and young family. Because my campus was 90 miles away from our house, it wasn’t easy to go back to get something I needed. Using this kind of daily map worked very well for me for several years. (Keeping a closed list so I didn’t overload myself was also very helpful.)

I created a digital template to print out, and then hand-wrote things in the context boxes. Here’s an example:

Jake Knapp’s burner list is also a map. He organizes his sections by priority level rather than context. This might be more useful if you are not juggling multiple contexts — if, for example, you work from a home office.

Use Symbols to Help You Scan Your Task List

This is what I’m doing now. For a few years I used Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal system, and the bullets — the symbols — were especially helpful.

Since then, however, I switched to a set of symbols that works better for me, because it is easier for me to see them at a glance. Here’s my adaptation of Patrick Rhone’s elegant Dash/Plus system. (I sacrificed some of the elegance of using dashes as the baseline for everything. I wanted to keep using my old symbol for meetings, which looks like a caret ^ when I haven’t yet attended them, and looks like a triangle when I have.)

Whether you love paper and pens or love your Apple Pencil, it is important to enjoy the tools you use for planning. You are much more likely to engage with your list when it’s fun to use the app or pick up the notebook.

References

Mueller, P. A. and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014) ‘The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking’, Psychological Science, 25(6), pp. 1159–1168. doi: 10.1177/0956797614524581

Meadows, D. H. and Wright, D. (2008) Thinking in systems: a primer. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Pub.

Ainsworth, S., Prain, V. and Tytler, R. (2011) ‘Drawing to Learn in Science’, Science, 333 (6046), pp. 1096–1097. doi: 10.1126/science.1204153

Allen, D. and Fallows, J. (2015) Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Revised ed. Edition. New York City: Penguin Books.

Knapp, J. (2021) The “Burner List”—My simple, paper-based system for focused to-dos, Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/make-time/the-burner-list-my-simple-paper-based-system-for-focused-to-dos-95497321cf14 (Accessed: 16 July 2021).

‘The Dash/Plus System’ (2014) Patrick Rhone, 13 September. Available at: https://patrickrhone.com/dashplus/ (Accessed: 16 July 2021).

Journal, B. (no date) @bluelahe, Bullet Journal. Available at: https://bulletjournal.com/blogs/bulletjournalist/show-tell-with-yu (Accessed: 16 July 2021).

Notes

*A daily list is not a formal system in the way that Donella Meadows describes it, but this is another situation where it’s useful to be able to scan various elements at once in order to prioritize throughout the day, especially if you have a lot of moving parts: tasks involving multiple people, multiple locations, things that depend on whether other things happen.

**Because artists think about things by making art, some people have very artistic daily lists. If I tried to make lists like these, it would take me a long time — but someone who habitually draws to think can do it a lot quicker.

***I’m using the word “tasks” here for what David Allen calls “next actions.” It is beyond the scope of this post to go into David Allen’s taxonomy of to-dos.