Creating a Plain Text Day Planner

Despite seeming to have had their heyday in the 2010s, productivity blogs still continue to thrive. Not a lot of what they publish is really new, but they all seem to have a common thread: those blogs cycle through various tools and techniques — some simple, many complex — to try to teach their readers how to get things done.

You can be excused for thinking that people weren’t productive before the advent of the internet, with all the shiny productivity tools that it seemed to spawn. But that’s not the case.

One of the most productive people I’ve ever met was someone I encountered in the early 1990s. At that time, I was working as a writer at a mutual fund company. He was an older gent (well, older than I was at the time) who happened to be one of the company’s top salespeople.

He didn’t keep track of everything that he had to do using the nascent planning software of the day. Instead, he used a humble day planner. Yes, that busy sales agent got things done with pen and paper.

He kept it simple, pared everything back to the basics. It worked well for him, and you can apapt what he did to plain text.

Let’s take a look at one approach to creating a plain text day planner.

Why Use Plain Text and Not a Calendar?

Admittedly, using a calendar application has its advantages. You can set up reminders and (fairly) easily share items in your calendar if you need to. To be honest, I find it faster and less tedious to add items into a plain text file than entering them into a calendar.

On top of that, if you need to you can share or sync a day planner file with others via your file syncing service or tool of choice.

Before You Begin

This article won’t go into how to structure the folder in which you’ll (at least, in which you should) store your day planner files. Read this article if you need some advice about that.

However, you should decide if you want to use a single file per day, or one file per week (broken into sections for each day). In this article, I’m going to look at using a single file per day.

Creating the Planner

The structure of the file that I’m about to describe is based heavily on that of a traditional paper day planner.

Start by creating a text file and give it a descriptive name. I put the date in the file name, which looks like this: dd-mm-yyyy-day-plan.txt — for example, 08-06-2022-day-plan.txt. Feel free to come up with a better naming convention for your files …

As with other files like this, I like to have some metadata at the top of the file to identify it at a glance when I’m working with it. Not just a date, but also a daily goal. Here’s an example:

---
Date: 08-06-2022

Goal for today: Wrap up updates to the essay collection
---

From there, enter what you have planned for today, broken down by blocks of time. That can be everything from meetings to appointments to break times to what you intend to learn or study. If it’s scheduled for that day, add it to your day planner file. I half-jokingly say that if it's not in my planner, it doesn't exist. At least, it's not going to happen.

Here’s an example:

---
Date: 25-05-2022

Goal for Today: Wrap up draft of proposal and send it out for review
---

08:30 - 09:00 - Call with x to discuss y
09:00 - 10:00 - Demonstrate new workflow tool
10:00 - 10:15 - Break
10:15 - 12:30 - Work on draft of proposal
12:30 - 13:00 - Lunch
13:00 - 14:00 - Finish draft of proposal
14:00 - 15:00 - Weekly project update meeting
.
.
. 

If you need to add more information about an item, include it as a note below the item, preceded by a >. Here’s an example:

10:15 - 12:30 - Work on draft of proposal
> Contact DK for additional information
.
.
.
14:00 - 15:00 - Weekly project update meeting
> Meeting URL: https://meet.jit.si/12345
.
.
.

I’ve created a template (under a CC0 license) that you can use and modify as you’d like.

Note About Creating a Weekly File

A weekly planner file will look a lot like the example above. There will be a block in the file for each day of the week. If you need to, separate the blocks for each day using three dashes (—).

I’ve created a template, which you can modify as you see fit.

Final Thoughts

Working with a plain text day planner can be a good antidote to dealing with an overloaded calendar. You lose automation and reminders, but you’re forced to become more aware and mindful rather than relying completely on technology to keep you on track.