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for the curious.
I use a pen & paper system, sort of like a bullet journal (but made in a graph paper notebook) as my calendar. Each page is a week of the year, with daily tasks and a to-do list made up. At the end of each week I reflect and see what I need to change.
Across the top is the actual "calendar" part of my calendar. Days of the week, what's happening on those days, self-explanatory. This part is drawn in through the end of the notebook, so I can mark future appointments in them. The rest is drawn up on a weekly basis.
Below that, on the left, is a grid for the tasks I do daily. Each row is a day, each column a task - This is for things like chores, daily walks, making the bed, job hunting, etc. Each one I complete, I get to mark off a box. I like having boxes for simple stuff at the start - one of them is even for just sitting down and starting to mark off the tracker. It helps me get a small bit of momentum at the start of the day.
To the right of the daily tasks box are one-off to-dos. I keep a list of long-term projects on my computer, in Getting things GNOME!, which I'll reference when I'm planning for the week; I'll pull in a few tasks from there, as well as add stuff that comes up as things do in life.
Below that, in pencil, is my reviews for the week. I do this part of the process on Saturday, since I take the weekends off from my daily chores. It's inspired by agile sprints (NERD) in that I look at what my process was from the prior week, see which parts of it worked and which parts didn't. In the image above, for example, I noted that having a box in the daily tasks for "Create" ended up putting too much pressure on me, so what was intended to be a time block for creativity just felt stressful instead. So, for this week, I left that box out (and added a box for morning meditation). I also like to review my journal entries for the week during this session - it gives me a chance to refresh some of the ideas I've had and would like to try.
I draw up the grid and select tasks for the next week on Sunday mornings (or sometimes Monday, depending on how I feel). I find the act of getting a ruler out and drawing the new grid is really meditative, so it feels good to do. This is the first system I've managed to make stick for more than a month - I've been following it since around mid-January, and it seems to be keeping me moving forward at least a little bit each day.
