Keywords: capture phase, capture list, calendar app, task time, grocery list, grocery item, work item, day, life, friction, track, easy. Powered by TextRank.
I have always struggled to remember and articulate what I have accomplished throughout my life. One of the reaons for this is I'm engaged in multiple project at a time and everything happens ad-hoc. As life get busier it becomes increasingly more difficult to track and do things. This is why I put together a framework that has helped me oragnize.
Everything that needs my attention goes into a capture list. This can be an app, a notebook or whatever works for you. The main feature is that capture has to be zero friction. I personally use Things3 because on the mac I can summon it with a key-chord and start writing immediately. There is also an iOS app and I keep a widget on my home screen to capture things. If something is trivial to do and takes a minute or so I just do it. Even with low friction somethings are not worth the overhead of capturing.
At least once a day, but usually more than that I go over my capture list and put the items where they belong. E.g a work item that is going to take more than 15 minutes gets assigned to a calendar slot in my day, grocery item that I want to pick up later goes into the shared grocery list in Reminders, etc.
Life isn't perfect and I sometimes under estimate task times or somebody sends a meeting request at time I had alloted to working. I go over my calendar and organize based on changing needs. I update the description part of these items in my Calendar and note down what I did on this task or other things I want to remember later. Sometimes I can't even get to tasks so I move them around.
Actually do the stuff in my calendar or capture inbox.
Adding these tasks to my calendar has made it very easy to track what I worked on and what I did on it. Every morning for stand up I just need to look at the previous day in my calendar app and it's very easy to speak to my work.
373 words
~ 2026-01-23
Generated on 1 Feb 2026 at 11:48 PM
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