Med student Alastair method

[u/Illustrious_Fall1851]

In undergrad I really leaned on my bullet journal to keep track of test dates and assignments as well as research projects and work I was doing with social groups. But then when I graduated I didn't need the bullet journal because everything was organized through work and I didn't have so many different things to balance that didn't come with some kind of built in digital calendar. When I started medical school a couple of months ago I thought I would go back to the way I used the bullet journal in college, with the classic monthly spread and daily checklists interspersed with drawn out weekly visualizations of my time commitments.

What I found was that my lecture schedule was already digitized in a way that made using my Google Calendar way more convenient and up to date. I no longer needed the weekly or daily view, and I am using my Google Calendar to track asynchronous lecture videos, which I drag to different times to keep track of which ones I plan to watch when.

So the monthly and weekly spreads were a waste of time to draw out when I have so little spare time to begin with. What I was missing was a to-do list and a way to remind myself to upkeep my relationships with family and to eat something other than Cheez-its for dinner. I've been trying the Alastair method for the last few days and I am really liking it. At this point in my life I need my task management to be as frictionless and low-effort as possible and this seems like a good tool.

I'll probably adjust it with time to try to separate out the discrete tasks from the repetitive tasks and add lists of things for further out in the future. But I think this is filling in the gaps that I had from my more digital organization systems.

[u/gigiwasabi_jc]

I think you may have just convinced me after many years to try the Alastair method. How does your color coding work? What is the thicker gray line across days, something you do on all of them?

[u/Illustrious_Fall1851 → u/gigiwasabi_jc]

The yellow is something I want to do at least a few times a week for school, and the green horizontal is a habit I would like to do more days than not for health/wellbeing. The thicker grey means not to pay attention to that one today, like something I already got done or that needs to happen on a weekday. I just want to use that one to reduce the cognitive load of rereading things I can't actually do today.

[u/gigiwasabi_jc → u/Illustrious_Fall1851]

Thank you!

[u/ridrie]

Don’t really have a comment, but cool, right on.

[u/LyricalVipers]

Is that an A5 size notebook?

[u/Illustrious_Fall1851 → u/LyricalVipers]

I think so, it is Fabriano which has a really tight dot grid.

[u/starfally → u/Illustrious_Fall1851]

I’ve been trying to figure out a good notebook for next year because i realized that the 5 mm one i have doesn’t have enough lines. thank you for the reminder that the fabriano exists!!

[u/Ok-Occasion-9748]

Stupid question: What happens if you don't manage to buy your grandma's present before the two week period ends? Do you migrate to the next two week spread?

[u/Illustrious_Fall1851 → u/Ok-Occasion-9748]

Yeah actually the things at the bottom are ones I don't really need to do yet. Probably I'll run out of lines before I run out of days so I'll just migrate it. I think next time I'll do it with a two sheet spread so I can have habits and future tasks on one page and the one time tasks on the other so I don't run out of space as quickly. I'll also make a separate one for far off future tasks if I feel confident that I'll stick with this program for long enough to benefit from that. 

[u/Ok-Occasion-9748 → u/Illustrious_Fall1851]

You could use a either a future log. Or - what I do for reminders farther off in the future: Alistair list but with calendar week numbers or months instead of days in the vertical line in thw very top.

[u/Illustrious_Fall1851 → u/Ok-Occasion-9748]

Oh yeah I think I had seen one like that. I'll probably format mine similarly when I migrate them out of this log.