The "Stick & Stamp" method

tl;dr: stick the plan on the page, stamp what happens, and follow each task's thread by its letter as you work through your day.

My work notes moved back to paper a while ago, and over the last month the pages have settled into a method worth naming: "Stick & Stamp".

Two-page notebook spread, deliberately blurred. A pink sticky note holds a task list, with arrows to timestamped log lines; a shaded time bar runs across the top of both pages. — *Wednesday. The plan on the pink sticky, the stamps in blue, a time bar across the top, and the evening on the right-hand page.*

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Note: naturally, all the pages are blurred, since it's detail that isn't needed to get the point across.

Every stretch starts at square one

An A5 spiral dot-grid notebook, folded back so one page faces up, pen on the strap.

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The simplest one would be a gel multi-pen, like the Zebra Sarasa 3C

The day splits into two or three stretches, and each stretch gets a fresh page: a "square one". I put the date in a red box on top, and I also add the the week number above it on Mondays.

(I came up with a scheme of "Red ink is for plans, blue for what happened", but naturally, tweak this to what suits you)

Stick the plan

The stretch's tasks go on a sticky note in the middle of the page, or in a red box drawn in its place. Each task gets a circled letter, and an X (in blue or black) when it's done or dropped. Anything unscheduled that barges in, I like to place at the bottom, marked "Interrupt:".

Stamp what happens

The rest of the page is stamps: an underlined 24-hour time and as few words as possible. Square brackets hold asides and lessons (whatever helps me improve this system). Open-circle bullets at the bottom catch side-quests, or unrelated or personal stuff that don't necessarily belong (and sometimes get struck out).

Follow the threads

An arrow runs from each task to its first stamp. After that, the task's letter sits next to later stamps, so its thread can be followed down the page, or onto the next one, without more arrows.

The time bar

Some days the "title" strip becomes a time bar: half-hour cells shaded by where the time went, labelled above and below. The idea is for stamps to say what got done; the bar says where the hours went ... and give me more of a 'time awareness'.

Though, yes, it's the newest part, and I'm still not always doing it (e.g. it's missing in the one below)

Two-page notebook spread, deliberately blurred. Three yellow sticky notes hold task lists, with arrows to a column of timestamped log lines. — *Monday. No time bar, two stickies on the left page, and a third, shorter list on the right.*

Half the stamps are hand-offs

Reading back, about half the stamps are me handing work to something else: "Fired off Codex thread." "Asked Claude to just create a draft PR." "Copilot review done, getting Codex review." Several usually run at once.

Each agent keeps its own transcript in its own window, and none of them knows about the others. The page is the one place that holds the order of things, and which thread belongs to which task. When something finishes and I've forgotten why I started it, the letter tells me.

Work in Progress

It's about a month old. The time bar may not survive, and I haven't decided whether the sticky note beats the drawn box. I'll check back in a few months.