I've been too busy to write, but I haven't been too busy to read. A few days ago I read chapter 5.

This time we're finally getting at some of the meat of the Cycle System. And while I'm definitely finding the other things in this book very interesting as well, I was particularly looking forward to this chapter and the next 2 that are specifically about the Cycle System.

This chapter left me a bit confused and even uncomfortable. For one this chapter really made me feel that I don't want to do this on paper anymore. I really want to make this work with my phone and PC, so I've been trying that for a few days. But that makes certain other things more difficult.

First off this chapter pointed out to me that I really should be doing the day schedule as well as the list of tasks for each day. Because I'd only read chapter 4 so far and my understanding of this system was limited (well, more limited than it is right now) I didn't really do anything with the hourly schedule. In fact I didn't make any room in my notebook for it either. But it does seem like a really helpful idea to do that. This means that I need to adjust the way I organize my notebook and I don't quite like the new organization.

Second it disappointed me a little. I had given myself a bunch of space to make notes during the day both for tasks that needed to be done today and tasks that didn't need to be done today but did need to go onto my list soon (like the next day), but also for other things that I just need to remember. I was hoping to maintain that, but other than adding tasks for today or a specific other day it didn't really provide much to me in the way of where to jot these down or how to deal with them.

One of the reasons that I feel like I really want to do this on my phone and PC again is that most of what is talked about in this chapter just feels so much simpler to do there than it does on paper. But the problem there for me remains visualization. I use Emacs and org-mode for just about everything I can, and while that does provide me with an agenda view that shows me a bit about the timing of appointments and activities during the day, it's not necessarily set up in such a way that it helps figure out how much time I have during the day. And I think right now that's the biggest problem I have with doing things on my phone/PC, figuring out how much time I have in a day. I can schedule tasks for specific days, I can make agenda views on my PC and also in Orgzly on my phone, but Orgzly doesn't show me the Effort I specify for a task. In Emacs I can do this in several ways, for example the column display.

This might also not really be an issue. Maybe I can just use my PC every morning and plan my day there. Definitely the whole "write everything down when you can't do it right away" has been very helpful.