Discussion Forum > My Personal System
I think this is a good example of working with what works for you. I have often felt that the advice to have one list to rule them all is difficult. Having separate lists/notebooks that align with your mode makes sense to me.
September 22, 2025 at 21:22 |
Brent
Brent
I’m new to Mark Forster and really loving what I’m reading about over the past week
I thought I’d share a new system that I’ve been using:
3 Main Lists - each list is kept in a spiral notebook that stays open on my desk
1. Projects: This list shows 1 current big project for work. The 1 page just has tasks associated with this project. Subsequent projects are kept on a running “up next list” on the second page. I personally benefit from a hard limit on active projects to prevent myself for having 5-10 things on the go that don’t get finished.
2. Routines: This is a simple list of daily/weekly routines that come from the main areas of life I want to put conscious attention into keeping up with. Exercise, Nutrition, Musical Practice, Home Cleaning etc There are 1-2 tasks from each of these areas. This list is sort of like a weekly checklist to keep a birds eye view on these tasks and prevents re-writing them daily.
3. Admin/General Task List: This list is similar to the DIT task list, and I’ve been using the DIT principles since reading Mark’s book. Just a simple closed list, and using the Manana principle to put tasks into tomorrow.
The real reason I find this system useful is that whenever I attempt to collapse these three areas into one overarching system or list, I’m less mindful about how I engage with these different areas. By creating 3 distinct categories it makes looking at my day much easier and I can use timeblocks if I need to or just use a more natural approach of rotating which of the 3 buckets I engage with.
I’ve found that on some days I benefit from a technique where I work on each area for 5-10 minutes and rotate them - or on some days when the feeling is right I can dive into a project block that is much longer, or chain together a series of Routine tasks and knock them down.
One seemingly trivial but super important part of this system is how having three separate spiral note books that stay open on my desk supports this. I tried running this with everything tucked away in a single notebook or in different spots in Apple Reminders etc but having 3 separate notebooks - 1 dedicated to each category of work really seems to make the system stick into my life better. No opening notebooks or tabs on a computer - the spreads are always available on my desk when it’s time to jump into one of them
I personally have been quite impressed with how resilient this system is and how straight to the point it is.
You can probably see how excited I was to find Mark’s work as I’ve naturally played around with many systems that are in the same spirit of his creative approaches to task/time management!
- Beau