Transcription
Over the last several months, I have been trying to figure out the best way to manage my task list. I stopped using Todoist, and I moved back to the basics: a notebook. I built my system around the bullet journaling method and broke my tasks into buckets, or collections, as they would be called in Bullet Journal (BJ) language. And I had a daily collection, a weekly collection, a monthly collection, and a future collection.
I quickly came across one problem: my weekly collection and monthly collection went beyond one page. When this happened in a notebook which I used daily, these collections spread across more than one page, and these pages were not beside each other in the notebook, making it difficult to keep on top of them and not let anything fall through the cracks.
In this video, I'm going to show you how I have ended up using just one simple list in Apple Reminders to manage all of my work priorities and how this adapts daily. Together, we will walk through how it morphed from the notebook, then into Apple Notes, and how it has ended up in Apple Reminders. Hi, if you're new here, I am Jill, and this channel is all about trying to do life right, with more of a focus on work life. If you like the vibes and you're getting value from the content, why not subscribe and hit that like button?
January 2025 was the month that broke me. January always feels like a long month for all of us, but my task list just kept growing—tasks that I needed to get done within the weeks and within the month. It was admin-heavy, people-heavy, with objectives, KPIs, alignment on the year ahead. And no matter how much preparation I could do ahead of time in December, there was always more in January. And this was the month that broke the analog method of managing this. The monthly collections literally spread across three pages of my notebook: page 95, page 125, and then page 164. The weekly log that commenced the week of the 20th of January went beyond one page, starting on page 152 and stretching onto page 172.
You might think I'm writing too many tasks down, and I can assure you I don't. I am an essentialist: if it's not a yes, it's a no. And I don't write maybe tasks or someday tasks—only the tasks that are essential to move the needle. I had to do something different. I had already recently started using Apple Notes for the recording of my meeting notes and thought it would be efficient to bring these collections into this app so I could move between them more easily. I created a separate note for the weekly collection and the monthly collection. Moving these digitally would fix the problem I had, as these lists could grow and remain in the same place, easy to locate and not missing anything.
But this caused a further challenge, which was more of a "fix what bugs you" problem. The movement of tasks from the monthly log to the weekly log, from one note to the other, was a bit of a copy-and-paste job, and it felt quite cumbersome. It would be nice to have the lists alongside each other so I could drag and drop them, pulling them from one collection to the other. And this brought me to Apple Reminders.
Initially, I felt quite reluctant about using it, as when I look back to the start of my bullet journaling method in December, when I went analog, I stopped using a task management app. But then I thought about the problem at the time. The reason I stopped was the automation of my day—the automatic pull of events that I had tagged with dates into my day, dictating the tasks I already planned to do that day, which were likely no longer a priority when I actually got to the day. What attracted me to bullet journaling was the opposite of that: the collections house the list of actions that you intended to complete monthly and weekly, and then daily, dependent on my day specifically—the commitments I had already planned for that day. I can be realistic, and I can pull the right tasks down from the weekly collection into the daily collection. And even though I'd been using Apple Reminders, I can still make this work.
And that is what I have built. It is literally just one list—that's it. A Kanban-style list with columns which I have named: Daily Log, Weekly Log, Monthly Log, and Future Log. And I like how Apple Reminders is so simple, as it keeps it really minimal. When I enter a new task, I simply record it in the right collection. Sometimes, if I know when I would like to complete it or when I need to, I will enter the date, but that's now a rare occurrence, as I like to remain agile, to flex day-to-day, reacting to the unplanned nature of my job. If I have some notes that form some context around the reminder, I'll simply note the Daily Log reference, which is just the date of that Daily Log and the name of the meeting. Unfortunately, currently, Apple Reminders doesn't support tagging Apple Notes directly in the Reminders app. This functionality would so complete this feedback loop for me, but the use of the list is simple and has cut down time considerably for me. As I have evolved this process, it's slick with the drag and drop, which I do daily, pulling from the weekly log into the daily log, and then at the end of the week, when I plan the next week at the high level, pulling from the monthly log into the weekly log.
Thank you for watching, and I hope to see you in the next one. Bye.