Reviewing: I review the daily todo every morning and update it every night, and I do EOW and EOM status updates with detailed analyses for the weekly and monthly files. Why could I not finish something? What should I do next month to correct it? That kind of analysis.

Moving / Reprioritizing: It's a necessity for me, because unlike a salaried job, I have to balance between my revenue-earning work and my hobbies. I do have to defer tasks often, to a different week or even a different month, all the time. The EOW and EOM updates are when I decide what I should defer to later. But the ideal is to stick to the schedule as much as possible through self-discipline and willpower.

Working notes: Each project and idea gets its own directory. I maintain current status of each project in its directory along with detailed notes, so that I can pick it right back months later. These are stored and tracked outside the above todo system. Since I review even the yearly goals everyday, everything gets done to a reasonable extent even if it's some months later than planned.

Trivial tasks: When I started off, I had just the yearly and daily todos. It's precisely because of trivial tasks - esp tasks which are one-time but critical nonetheless - that I introduced weekly and monthly todos. Anything important that takes time and requires me to allocate time goes into one of these lists. Otherwise my mind is unable to allocate time efficiently. Very trivial tasks like "have lunch" don't go anywhere, but I keep buffers in the daily todo for all such daily routine tasks.

If you are into learning stuff, you have probably heard of "deliberate practice". Reviewing tasks daily/weekly/monthly, and explicitly analyzing and planning for them is my way of "deliberate practice" for my life goals. I have tried a lot of visual tools in the past - GTD tools, Trello, Mind mapping - but two problems all of them had was 1) writing detailed analysis is not possible in the given interface and 2) they are designed as store to remember tools which means review may be possible but deliberate practice of planning is not easy.

Thank you! I truly appreciate you taking the time to explain all that. I think this system could work for me. I've just added those four text files into a folder, a notes folder, and also found an ios app which lets me easily view and edit txt files via Dropbox. (Textor)

So, you review all four files each day? I'm guessing that if the review system is properly done, then daily and weekly files see the most change?

I've also had issues with trello and other apps, and agree it's hard to handle the analysis within the interface. I don't follow your second point though. What do you mean by store to remember, and how does it inhibit planning but allow review?

Am also self employed, so looking forward to this system. Self management required constant attention.

Also this is a trivial feature, but do you list things with asterisks and cut/paste them down to a "Done" area when finished? Or something else?

Reviewing: I read all 4 files everyday to motivate, reinforce my memory and also see if anything is off track. It can happen sometimes that I have ended up allocating too much time to one thing and not enough to another. Daily reading corrects helps correct that. I write end of day analysis every night, end of week analysis on Sunday nights, and end of month analysis on last day of the month. Daily file sees the most changes, weekly less so. Monthly and yearly typically change if I get a new idea or drop an idea or get approached with a new project.

Problems with other tools: Writing a daily plan from scratch helps me go into the details of the task for that day. My experience with those other tools was that they were ok for creating a high-level plan once, store it, modify it occasionally and even review it everyday. But the interfaces were not convenient to design a detailed daily plan everyday, which meant a lazy person like me would simply review the plan without much modification, and I'd also lose the history of the project. In my text file, I can easily see if I end up with a long sequence of partial or skipped tasks, and make some corrections, but in those tools I could not.

Done tasks: I just write [DONE] / [PARTIAL] / [SKIPPED] against the task, along with reasons for the latter two. If I accumulate too many partial or skipped tasks on consecutive days, something is wrong - typically I'd have underestimated complexity of some idea - and a correction is required at least in the weekly plan.

My best wishes for your system! Keep at it with systematic self-analysis, and you'll be able to find and correct your weaknesses.

Sorry if asking too much about the details, but I'm interested in how you track a task being delayed multiple times for consecutive days.

Do you just know it from daily analysis, or are you creating a new file for each day/week/month, and periodically look through those?

And how about weeks, new file for each week? or just clear it out every new week, and bring stuff back up to the year file?

I have exactly 4 files - no new files. At the end of the D/W/M/Y, I just add a new section on top and plan the period there. So each file has a record of all previous period plans. These are all cumulative files - I never clear out previous period's plans, just add a new section on top.

To see a task that's delayed multiple times, I just have to scroll down and look for [PARTIAL]/[SKIPPED] markers and their analyses. Usually, the daily analysis results in some corrective action that may also go into the weekly or monthly plans.

Thanks! that clears things up.

I'm going to run with this & iterate over the next few weeks. Last couple of days have already been nice, dumping all my disparate lists into these 4 files.