Finally, a topic on HN where I can be somewhat of an old-timer.

For my first 7-8 years as a professional, I used notebooks. I was taught in mechanical engineering school to use notebooks with bindings and write notes about everything to cover my ass in case of a legal issue. I developed a simple system:

- front front to back, write notes from meetings, brainstorms or anything

- from back to front, write todo lists.

- Actions from meetings are noted in the “front” notes with an arrow in the left hand margin but copied to the “back”. Normally I never refer to the front unless I forget why I made an action

- For actions: checkmark completed, cross out cancelled and crossout with an arrow “moved” actions

- when my actions page fills up, I simply cross the page out and “move” unfinished actions to the next page (from back to front)

- when the notebook is full I “move” actions to a new notebook and start over.

- the act of physically rewriting actions is a great tool to understand what you’ve been procrastinating on and what you can drop without much consequence

When I moved to a new industry that doesn’t put people at risk, therefore no need to cover my ass legally, I switched to the equivalent system using markdown notes and Todoist. I thought it would be great to be able to search previous notes and see statistics. After another 7-8 years I realized I never ever searched my previous notes and missed being able to thumb through notebooks. I got advice from a mentor that taking notes in a book is more professional/ less distracting in a professional setting. I also missed the exercise of manually copying/ consolidating/culling actions. I found myself mindlessly postponing Todoist actions to tomorrow or next week. However, I work in a larger team now and need to delegate actions.

So I developed a hybrid system which has worked well:

- notes in a notebook, written from front of the notebook to back

- actions have an arrow in the margin

- each day I add all actions to the most recent page of actions. This is no longer from back to front but “inline” with the rest of the notes, so I get a chronological sense of when the page is filled and actions moved to a new page. Actually, I move to a new page whenever I feel the urge to prioritize something, which goes to the top of a new page. If I have a tough day ahead of me, the first thing I do is start a new actions page and follow the order without reconsidering it. If I have a really tough day I will add “check email” as an action and put it far from the top.

- at the end of each workday, for any case where other stakeholders are involved, I type meeting minutes and duplicate actions as tickets in our system

- whenever I move actions to a new page I close tickets corresponding to my actions and follow up on others actions

- if I don’t have my notebook on me, I use notes on my phone temporarily

I don’t actually manage to keep things consistent daily but whenever I make a new action page I tend to update everything. And I find it much less mental load to update tickets based on written notes (I trust a written check mark and tend to remember why I made the check mark) than to update tickets based on emails or comments or whatever (they are usually a rabbit hole)