The Medium Method
Table of Contents
This simple method is meant as a starting point for merging paper and digital into your workflow to capture all of the benefits of both.
1. Main Notebook
This notebook is what I work out of during the day. It sits open on my desk collecting everything. It’s a task collector, a scrapbook (daily comic strips often find their way in), an event grabber, a notepad, a sketchbook, a journal and a commonplace book (for gathering quotes and notes from what I read, like and learn.) This is the notebook’s dedicated purpose.
2. The nightly (morning) review
At the end of each day, I do a nightly transcription and review. This is when I open my notebook and look at everything that I’ve collected from the day, and begin to process it. I look for any future events and add them to my online calendar. I look for all completed tasks on my daily post-it (more on this in a bit) and mark them complete in Todoist. I also add any new tasks from my notebook into Todoist, assigning all appropriate dates, notes and tags. I then look into my online calendar to see what I have scheduled for the next day, and I add those appointments to my post-it, followed by my top three tasks from Todoist.
3. A daily Post-It note
Why a post-it? Simply put, I find post-its are the hardest to ignore. I stick the day’s post-it to the next new page in my notebook and this forces me to stare at it all day as I am writing. If something is incredibly urgent I can stick the post-it to the screen of my computer or my phone or the front door. When I leave my desk, it’s just as easy to grab that little neon square and stick it inside of my pocket notebook. I also find that the limited space of the post-it forces focus. The post-it requires me to be aware of priority when making the list, and it allows me to see nothing but those three tasks throughout the day.
Often, while working, we allow incoming tasks to deter us from our most important daily goals. The Medium Method makes getting derailed more difficult. It’s hard to squeeze another task onto my post-it. If I’m going to squeeze a new task into my day, I have to really want to. Otherwise, if the task doesn’t qualify, it goes into my main notebook for Todoist entry later that evening.
The post-it also affords me the psychological satisfaction of crossing out a completed task. If at the end of the day, I’ve completed all three tasks I can crinkle the post-it up into a ball and shoot for the bin. If I’ve failed to complete all three, I carry the post-it over to the next day. And trust me, from experience, two post-it days suck and should be avoided at all costs.
4. Long-term digital storage
The last thing I do every day is copy all of my notes into OneNote (you can just as easily use Evernote or Google Keep.) All notes on movies, books, albums, etc. go into a notebook called “Commonplace.” This affords me the ability to utilize quick search in the future when needing information. I can also link notes to each other as I begin to see how new notes relate with older notes.
In OneNote, I have another notebook called “Journal.” In this notebook, I have sections for each month and in these sections are pages for each day. Here, I copy every important event that occurs during the day. While separated by day and month, I do not separate my journal pages by year. This means, for example, that my Dec 4th page has notes from 2015, 2014, and any other years for which I have notes.
When I copy the current notes into the journal each day, I can then be reminded of what happened on this same day in the past. The most important part of this process is that it allows me to search for past events. Past events aren’t something that we think of often when creating productivity systems, but wouldn’t it be useful to have access to this type of information when we need it? Wouldn’t it be nice to know: What day was that meeting? What was the name of that person that I met at the last networking event? What did we talk about? What was that restaurant we went to in Switzerland called? When did I buy my laptop? When does that warranty expire?
I even find that this nightly review is useful for social media. Did I think of anything short and funny today? Save that for Twitter tomorrow. Did I make any doodles or sketches that I like? Save that for Instagram. What concept from the book I’m reading stuck out as the most impactful? Save that to discuss in my Snapchat story for the next day.