Taking Tasks Digital Again

This year, I took my task list analog again with the Bullet Journal Method, or “BuJo,” as practitioners call it.

There are a few ways to collect tasks in a BuJo journal. You can write a task on the current month’s task page. You can write it in the daily log, a page dedicated to a single day. If a task belongs to a future month, it goes in the future log.

At the end of the month, you copy unfinished tasks from the current month’s task page and daily log onto next month’s task page. I did this migration from January to February.

By March, I couldn’t bring myself to move February’s open tasks to March’s task page. There were too many of them, and rewriting them seemed like a waste of time. It felt like administrative work.¹

The obvious fix was to drop the migration step altogether. With a dedicated notebook for tasks, I could write each task once and leave it in place until it was done. That worked well, but it had one big problem for me: space.

A task is rarely just a task (e.g., Call insurance agent about new policy). It usually comes with important information and notes. Even if you leave room for them when you write the task down, you can still run out of space as the notes grow. A simple task can span weeks of status updates and new information.

This was a pain point, but not enough to make me switch back to digital until I started using Grok Bot. I learned I could create a bot that manages my tasks in Apple’s Reminders app.

My bot creates tasks when I ask it to, or from the context of an email. It adds the relevant information and status updates in the notes field. It schedules tasks by priority and slots them into openings on my calendar.

I don’t have to write tasks down or cram status updates into the space between two tasks. I don’t have to migrate tasks or flip through my notebook to find one; I just ask the bot for my task list. It never forgets an open task, and it can’t miss one by flipping past the page the way I could.

For me, digital is the only way to go, and I don’t plan to go back to analog.