Simple Moleskine GTD for Students
Before I started using a Moleskine for tracking all of the stuff I had to do, I had wandered between several systems for tracking everything I needed to do as a student.
- I had printed up some of the 8.5 x 11 weekly planner pages from DIYPlanner and I would put every assignment down as I got it - placing it on the day that it would be due
That was a bit big and kludgey, I had to consciously remember to flip through several big pages to find things that were beyond the current week - I tried using the Moleskine weekly diary to track deadlines and my regular Moleskine notebook to track more minute details for these assignments
Too much stuff to carry and it was awkward having to flip back and forth between the two books - I just tried to remember assignments wherever I could and entered major stuff into my Outlook calendar
Well, it’s memory, we all know how reliable a storage medium that is
What the system finally evolved into was a simplification of the hyalineskies GTD Moleskine, for me, what it ended up being was a glorified todo list. Maybe next semester (now that I have read Getting Things Done) I might try to attempt a more “standard” implementation of the GTD system. Here is what it came down to:
Supplies
- Moleskine Pocket Squared Notebook
I am a good engineer, so I can’t be without my squared paper - Some sort of Post-it Tabs
- Pilot VBall Grip
I am an office supply junkie, so I am always trying out some sort of a new pen, this is just what I am using right now
Sections
This particular breakdown ended up working for me, I’ll go into detail on each section below:
- Weekly Tasklists
- Media Lists
- Music
- Movies
- Projects & Notes
- Someday/Maybe
Sections Explained
Weekly Tasklists: This is the meat of what I used my Moleskine for, at first I was doing just a perpetual task list, but that ended up just getting messy. This seemed a little bit more compartmentalized, and it allowed just enough space each week for the volume of tasks that I was dealing with. I would lay out the page with the title in big text “Week of [Month] [Monday's Date], [Year]” - thus next week’s heading would be “Week of May 18, 2007″.
I would then add each assignment that would be due that week as well as other miscellaneous tasks that I needed to get done for myself, outside of any classwork. Each line was formatted like this:
[Class Abbreviation] - [Assignment/Task Name/Details] - [Day of the Week Abbreviation] - [Check Box]
Example:
LIT - Read Crime & Punishment (Tu) []
What that would allow me to do is at a glance, see what tasks were due when and if they had been completed. In the check box, I would put either a check or an arrow, which indicated that the task was completed or that it was deferred/moved to next week, respectively.
Media Lists: Here I have a running list of movies I want to see, and music I want to check out. In some cases, I put the release date of the album or movie if it isn’t out yet
Projects & Notes: This section is for bigger tasks or assignments, rather than the one-liners that I put in my Weekly Tasklists. Each one will usually be on its own page. The entries here generally fall into one category or the other:
- Aggregated Tasklists: For an extended project I’ll put a list of subsections or tasks that I need to do along with deadlines where appropriate, formatted similarly to my Weekly Tasklist
- Portable Notes: For something where I need to be taking down notes and I’ll need to be referring to them on the go, I’ll do a page here
I set up a Table of Contents at the front of the book, where I index all of my Projects & Notes (having numbered all of the pages), but as of yet, I have not really needed it, so I’m not sure I will continue that practice.
Someday/Maybe: This one is pretty much straight out of GTD - any sort of things that I’d like to do at some point, but I haven’t really made an issue of pursuing them in the present or near future, I’ll put them down here.
Section Dividers
For each section except the Weekly Tasklists, I have a tab on the currently active page (i.e. after a page has been filled out and there is nothing active on it any more, I’ll move the tab to the next active page). For the Weekly Tasklist section, I use the ribbon bookmark built into the Moleskine.
Pictures
My Moleskine
A filled-out page from my Weekly Tasklist Section
Related Links
- Hyalineskies - Hacking a GTD Moleskine
- Hyalineskies - Resolving Resolutions (Follow up to Hacking a GTD Moleskine)
- Gathering in Light - Create a Moleskine PDA: The Student GTD Hack
- Moleskinerie - A blog about all things Moleskine
February 20th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
[...] Simple Moleskine GTD for Students from David Giesburg Dot Com [...]
March 13th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
[...] Things Done Mar.09, 2008 in blog Remember the Milk. Plain and simple. For a while, I was using a moleskine-based system, but that just got to be too cumbersome for the nature of my workload. As a student, the work that [...]