activity journalling / task management - strategies and tools?

Posted by jimspoon
Oct 4, 2010 at 07:16 AM

I keep a detailed journal of my activities. I wonder if any of you do the same? I have found it to be a very useful habit. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed to remember something, and then gone back and found the information in my daily journal. Without my journal, my life becomes one big confused blur.

Now the trick is to find the best way to tie in my journalling with task management. Practically everything I do is in some way related to some project or task I’m working on. Ideally, every journal entry would get filed under the project and task and subtask to which it relates. That way, I could easily review my hierarchy of project / tasks / subtasks, and see the related chronology of activities. On any task, I could readily see what I had already done, where I left off, and where I needed to pick up again.

I need the ability to make my journal entries in one big chronological list, and then to be able to go back later and categorize each action to the appropriate project / task / subtask. Ideally - there would be some intelligence in the program, so that it would monitor what I’m typing, and figure out the related projects / tasks and let me confirm them. (I know, that’s asking a lot.)

I’ve been using Ecco for my journalling, but haven’t yet been doing much in the way of categorizing the journal entries. (For me a major problem with Ecco are the limits on the number of items. With my heavy journalling, I am very rapidly hitting the item number limits and getting error messages.) I’ve experimented a bit with InfoQube, but haven’t been able to find the time to work on learning it.

So, I am just curious regarding what you all might be doing in the way of recording your activities, and tracking your status and progress on your various projects, and what strategies and software tools you are using for that.

Jim