Process Organization

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French writer, poet, journalist and aviator.

This chapter is about planning your work, organising your day, and improving the way you execute your tasks.

When you start reading this part, you may be thinking something like:

“I don’t have that many things to do. My days are fairly routine, and if I need to remember something, I rely on my memory.”

We already saw in the previous chapter what memory is good at — and what it is not. The real question is not whether you can hold more things in your head. The question is whether it is a good use of your mental resources to do so. And if there is a better way, why not use it?

A Gold Mine

When we are born, we each receive the most valuable resource we will ever have. Imagine starting out in life with around 30,000 gold ingots. The only condition is that you spend one ingot every single day, without exception. You cannot earn more, and you cannot pause the spending.

At first, you barely notice. You have plenty, and one ingot a day seems trivial. But as the years pass, the reserve shrinks — and the remaining ingots become more precious than ever.

That gold is time. You cannot buy it, earn it back, or pause it. What you can do is decide, consciously, where to invest it.

Most people spend years working hard without asking whether they are working on the right things. Long hours are not a guarantee of meaningful results. At some point, almost every professional discovers this the hard way.

Make a clear separation between your professional and personal lives.

I learned this personally. As a young professional, I was passionate about my work and spent far more hours than required. That went on for years. One day, I arrived at the office and started feeling deeply unwell — not like a cold or the flu, but something harder to name. I could barely breathe. I could not focus on anything. I went to a doctor immediately.

It was burnout. An anxiety crisis brought on by sustained overwork and stress.

I had three months away from work to reflect. The conclusion I reached was this: it is never about the amount of time, but the quality of the time.

From that point, I adopted two rules I have kept ever since. I do not work outside working hours. And when I am stuck on a problem, the most productive thing I can do is step away — change task, go for a walk, rest. A professional does not provide value by sitting in front of a screen for long hours. Value comes from clear thinking and good decisions. Neither is possible with a tired mind.

If we fail to prepare, we prepare to fail.

– James H. Hope, State Superintendent of Education for South Carolina.

I also learned early on that preparation matters far more than most people admit. On my first day at a new job, I sat down and started sketching a diagram to clarify the approach to my first task. My colleague looked over and asked what I was doing. When I explained, he said: “We are not here to draw. We are here to build.”

That attitude — which I came to call factory thinking — treats visible output as the only measure of work. If you are not typing, you are not working. But would you trust an architect who gave instructions to the builders without a blueprint? Would you accept treatment from a doctor who had not investigated your symptoms?

Preparation is not wasted time. It is the investment that makes every hour after it more valuable.

Spend time in preparation, and your time will have double value.

And direction matters just as much. If you do not know where you are going, you cannot know whether you are getting closer.

If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable.

Any meaningful project needs a clear starting point, a defined endpoint, and a path between them. Every task, decision, and action should bring you closer to that endpoint. Anything else is spending your gold without a return.

Collect all the information you need before investing your time.

Before You Start Organizing Your Time

When everything is urgent, nothing truly is. Most of us receive dozens — sometimes hundreds — of notifications every day, from messaging apps, email, social networks, news feeds, and productivity tools. We often enable them without thinking, and they interrupt us constantly.

Warren Buffett once said: “The poor invest their time, while the rich invest their money.” Time is the one resource that money cannot buy. Treating it carelessly is one of the most common and costly habits in modern work life.

The goal here is not to disconnect from technology. Technology is useful. The goal is to use it with intention rather than letting it use you.

One of the clearest and most immediate improvements you can make is to draw a firm line between your professional life and your personal life. You would not want a colleague calling you during a family dinner. By the same logic, your personal life should not pour into your working hours either. Nothing is so urgent that it cannot wait for a short, planned break — and if it is, there are better ways to reach you than a background notification.

Exercise 3.1: Review your active notifications

Most of us have no idea how many apps are sending us notifications. This exercise makes that visible.

Create a simple table with three columns. Open every device you use in a typical day: your phone, laptop, computer, tablet, or smartwatch. For each device, go through the active notifications and list them.

In the first column, note the device. In the second, note the app name. Leave the third column empty for now.

Once you have listed everything, step back and look at the full picture. If you are like most people, the number will surprise you.

Now go through each row and ask: do I genuinely need to be interrupted by this, in real time, every day? For most apps — social networks, podcasts, newsletters, promotional alerts — the answer is no. The apps themselves are not the problem; the real-time interruption is.

In the third column, write yes or no. Then go back to your devices and disable every notification marked no.

This single exercise can meaningfully reduce the number of times your focus is broken each day.

Different Organization Systems

Over the years, I have tried several productivity and organisation methods. Most of them had good ideas but were either too rigid, too complex to start with, or too difficult to introduce to a team.

Two systems have worked consistently well for me, and they complement each other naturally.

The first is GTD — Getting Things Done by David Allen. It is a thorough and highly effective system, and I have used it for years. The challenge is that starting from nothing and adopting GTD fully at once is difficult. It requires a significant shift in habits, and it leaves little room for personal adaptation.

For that reason, I spent years looking for a simpler starting point — something flexible enough for anyone to begin with, yet structured enough to actually work. In 2014, I found it: Bullet Journal¹, created by Ryder Carroll. It has everything needed to start building better habits around work organisation, and it leads naturally into GTD as your practice matures.

In the following sections, I will walk through a practical version of Bullet Journal, adapted for knowledge workers in any field. I strongly recommend reading both books for the full picture and the thinking behind each method.

Why analog

There are many excellent apps for managing tasks and organising work. Some of my favourites include Things by Cultured Code², OmniFocus by The Omni Group³, 2Do⁴, and Facile Things⁵, which is a web-based GTD tool accessible from any device.

They are all well-designed tools, and each one has genuine strengths. But none of them is a good starting point if you are building the habit from scratch.

The problem is not the tools themselves. The problem is that apps on your phone are also a significant source of distraction. Every time you open a task manager on your phone, you are one tap away from messages, social networks, and notifications. That makes it harder to stay in the habit and easier to get pulled in a different direction.

A physical notebook, on the other hand, does only one thing. That simplicity is exactly what makes it effective at the beginning. Analogue tools help you make a new process your own, and the physical act of writing reinforces what you are capturing.

My recommendation is to start with a notebook and pen. Once the habit is solid, you can layer in digital tools where they genuinely add value.

Start your journal

Exercise 3.2: Prepare your journal

Before setting up the journal, choose the right notebook. Here is what I recommend looking for:

• A5 or similar size. Small enough to carry with you anywhere, without adding bulk or weight.
• Heavyweight paper. You will be writing a lot. Thin paper lets ink bleed through and makes the pages harder to read.
• Dotted paper. Dots give you alignment guides without the rigid lines of a ruled notebook. They also make it easier to draw simple diagrams or tables when needed.
• Two or more bookmarks. These let you jump directly to your most recent entries without searching.

My personal recommendation is Leuchtturm1917, available in soft and hardcover versions. There is also a pre-formatted Bullet Journal edition of this notebook if you prefer a ready-made setup.

Step One: Prepare your Index

Select all the sources that contain pending tasks.

Before you can organise your work, you need to know where your tasks are currently living. Most of us have more inboxes than we realise.

Common sources include:

• Email inbox
• Messaging apps (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, or others)
• To-do list apps
• Paper notes or sticky notes
• Physical notebooks
• Project boards (Scrum, Kanban, or similar)
• Voicemail or call reminders
• Browser tabs left open as reminders

You do not need to catch every source on the first pass. The process is iterative, and you can add new inboxes as you discover them.

Step Two: Identify your InBoxes

Select all the sources containing pending tasks.

To collect tasks, the first thing you need to clarify is where to collect them from; this will include any source of tasks you might be keeping right now, even if you are not fully aware.

Typical places where you might find pending tasks are:

• Mail Inbox
• Slack (or any instant messaging app you are using personally or professionally)
• To-do list apps
• Paper sheets
• Notebooks
• Scrum or Kanban board

I forget many sources, but that doesn’t matter; you can process them later if needed. We call to process the inbox and review the content to determine the next steps.

Step Three: Process your InBoxes

Decide one by one what you will do with each pending item.

Processing is different from collecting. Collecting means capturing — getting things out of your head and into a trusted place. Processing means deciding what each item actually is and what should happen to it.

The simplest way to process an inbox is to follow a decision flow. Work through each item one at a time and ask the following questions.

Does this require action?

If no, there are two options: keep it as reference material, or discard it. If you keep it, file it in an archive — a folder on your computer, a bookmarks collection, a physical binder, or wherever you store documents you may need later. If it has no future value, delete it.

If yes, move to the next question.

Is it one action or more than one?

If it is one action, continue. If it requires several steps, it is a project — and projects get their own collection, which we will cover in the next section.

Can someone else do it?

If yes, delegate it and add a brief reminder to follow up. If no, continue.

Can it be done in under two minutes?

If yes, do it now. The time it takes to organise a very small task is usually longer than the task itself.

Does it have a fixed date or deadline?

If it belongs to a specific date, it goes on your calendar. If it needs to happen sometime this month, it goes into your Monthly Log. If it is further away, it goes into your Future Log.

The goal of this process is to reach Inbox Zero — not as a daily obsession, but as a reliable state you return to regularly. Every item that stays in your inbox unchecked creates a small, persistent pull on your attention. Processing clears that pull.

The Future Log

Open the four pages following your index. At the top of each page, write FUTURE LOG centred. Divide each page into three sections and label them with the next twelve months, two or three months per section.

The Future Log holds tasks you know about now but which belong to a future month — not this one.

Add this collection to your index as soon as you create it.

The Monthly Log

Take the next two pages and prepare your Monthly Log for the current month. Write the month name centred at the top of both pages.

On the left page, write each day of the month in a vertical list, followed by the first letter of the day of the week. This gives you a simple calendar view for the month.

On the right page, you will list the tasks you plan to complete at some point during the month. Tasks with a known date go on the left, next to the relevant day. Tasks without a fixed date go on the right.

Add this collection to your index.

When processing your inboxes, use the Monthly Log as the destination for tasks that belong to the current month. When you reach a task that belongs further in the future, add it to the Future Log instead.

Step Four: Create a Project

Any item that requires more than one action becomes a project and gets its own collection.

Find the next blank page in your journal and write the project name centred at the top. Then list the actions you need to complete to finish the project — as specifically as possible.

For example, if you were asked to prepare a presentation, your project list might include:

• Gather relevant background material
• Schedule a review meeting with the team
• Draft a structure or outline
• Validate the outline with key stakeholders
• Build the presentation
• Schedule a rehearsal session
• Incorporate final feedback and polish

Once you have the task list, select the first one or two actions to begin with and add them to your Monthly Log. Add the project to your index.

This approach has a practical advantage: you do not need to guess how many pages a project will use in advance. You start where there is space, and the index tracks everything.

SMART

Not everything that enters your inbox deserves a place in your journal. To keep the system clean and useful, every task you add should meet a simple set of criteria.

Avoid adding things that are part of your daily routine — commuting, eating, regular meetings — or anything vague like “work on the project.” These add noise without adding value.

Include items that are SMART. Do not include items that belong to a daily routine or that do not require a deliberate action from you.

SMART stands for:

S — Specific. M — Measurable. A — Achievable. R — Relevant. T — Time-bound.

Specific

Your task should be clear and unambiguous. What exactly needs to be done? By whom? Why does it matter? A task that is too vague will confuse you when you return to it later, especially if several days have passed. Be precise enough that your future self can pick it up without having to reconstruct the context.

Measurable

Avoid words like “improve,” “better,” or “faster” without defining what that means. If you cannot tell when a task is finished, it is not ready to be in your list. Define a clear outcome that you can confirm as done.

Achievable

Only include tasks that are actually within your reach. A task that depends entirely on someone else, or that is simply impossible given your current situation, will sit in your list without ever being completed. That creates noise and erodes your trust in the system. Being realistic is not the same as being unambitious.

Relevant

Every item in your journal should have a genuine impact on your work, your goals, or your day. If you cannot explain why it matters, it probably does not belong there.

Time-bound

Each task should have a rough sense of how long it will take. You do not need to time every action to the minute. But having a reasonable estimate helps you plan your day and set realistic expectations — for yourself and for others.

After this initial big inbox processing, the process will continue. Whenever you have a new task, add it to your inbox. It doesn’t matter if you use a notes app on your phone, a notebook, a shelf on your desk, or any other repository. The only condition to remember is keeping the collection and processing separate.

The separation between collect and process is crucial. Collecting is the process of moving any pending task out of your mind. You put that task in a repository, freeing your mind from that pulling effect. The processing allows you to decide what to do with that task.

Planning and Review

The journal only works if you use it consistently. That means building a small set of regular rituals — brief, focused, and predictable.

Daily Planning

Every morning, spend a few minutes preparing your day. This is your Daily Log: a fresh entry for the current date, listing the tasks you plan to work on today.

Pull tasks from your Monthly Log that feel right for today, and add anything new that has come up. Mark items you have moved from the Monthly Log with a > symbol to show they have been migrated.

Daily planning is one of the two processes you should do every day. Daily planning involves adding any task you plan to do during the day to your daily log. To do it, the first thing you need is your Daily Log. Create your Daily Log, find the first empty page in your journal, and prepare for the day. I will start my day on January 10th to get closer to reality.

This process shouldn’t take more than 15-20 minutes.

Daily review

WARNING

When you migrate a task more than twice, you should consider deleting it. Either it is unimportant, you are not motivated to do it, or someone else should be in charge. When you migrate more than twice, you should consider deleting the task.

This process should include:

• Process inboxes - If you added any tasks during your day, this is the moment to process them
• Process the daily log - Review the tasks you planned for the day, mark them as done, delete them, or migrate them to the Future, Month, or Daily Log.

WARNING

This process shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes.

Weekly Review

Once a week, usually on Sunday, you can plan your week. With a global vision of the week, you can select those tasks from the monthly log you’d like to do during the week. It also allows you to clean up those tasks we commented on before deleting (remember that deleting means crossing out the task in the list). Somehow, it is a housekeeping process.

This process should include:

• Review the month log
• Review last week’s daily logs
• Clean (delete) outdated or irrelevant tasks
• Select the tasks for the week.

WARNING

This process shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes.

Month Migration

At the end of the month, you need to perform what we call ‘Month Migration’. This process enables you to transfer all pending content from your daily and monthly logs and plan the content for future logs, which will be included in the upcoming month. This process aims to review any pending tasks you left over from the previous month, evaluate whether they are still worthwhile, and decide whether to move or delete them.

The Month Migration process should include:

• Create next month’s log for next month
• Move content from the future log that you planned for next month, and move it to the monthly log
• Delete any task that’s not valid anymore
• Start with the following daily log
• Add next month to the index
• Close the index for the previous month. Now that you know where the last month ends, don’t forget to add it to the index.

Key ideas

• Time is limited, so it should be invested with intention.

• Long hours do not guarantee better results; the quality of your attention matters more than the quantity of time you spend.

• Preparation is not wasted time; it increases the value of the work that follows.

• Clear goals make better decisions possible.

• Notifications, interruptions, and unclear priorities quietly drain your day.

• A good organization system reduces stress by moving tasks out of your head and into a trusted process.

• Collecting and processing are different activities, and both matter.

• Tasks should be clear, realistic, relevant, and small enough to act on.

• Planning and review are what keep a system useful over time.

• The best organization method is the one you can use consistently.