Issue 24: 2025 Techo Kaigi
Issue 24: 2025 Techo Kaigi
In her last newsletter, friend and stationery lover vrk mentioned a concept I’d (somehow) never heard of: techo kaigi.
The idea is you set a retrospective meeting with yourself (or maybe with friends) to review the planners and notebooks you’ve used, and what your intentions are for the coming year. Typically, this is done in the fall, coinciding with the release of new planners, because capitalism I guess.
I think it makes sense to think a little bit about how you keep yourself organized, at least at the level of systems. In this first issue of 2025, I’m going to describe what I call share my Life Management System, and what I’ve settled on for planning and organizing it.
The Life Management System
Disclaimer: This is what works for me. It may not work for you. That’s fine, I love you just the same.
There are five key areas to my Life Management System (LMS):
- Inbox Management: This area captures anything of note in my life. A giant bucket that’s reviewed regularly, at which time each item is scrutinized and is either processed into areas 2 through 4, delegated, or deleted. This is managed in managed in email/app inboxes, pocket notebooks, read-it-later apps, and more.
- Time Management: This area organizes when things happen in my life. The temporal component of my life is managed here. This includes appointments, deadlines, and scheduled tasks, but also things like travel time and work logs; this is managed in a calendar app or a paper planner.
- Task Management: This area organizes what things happen in my life. The action component of my life is managed here. This includes goals, priorities, and to-dos; this is managed in a to-do app or a paper planner.
- Information Management: This area organizes the which, what, who, and how aspects of my life. The resources component of my life is managed here. This includes a huge array of items, from user manuals to literature notes to contact information to contracts to… well, you get the idea. This is managed in a notes app. As this needs to be highly searchable, I haven’t yet found a reasonable analogue counterpart.
- Mental Emesis: Forgive the vulgar term, but while the rest of the LMS areas are about bringing things in, this is all about getting things out. This includes journaling, writing, sketching, coding experiments — getting stuff out of my head (and often feeding into the capture cycle, though sometimes it’s emotional hygiene). This is managed in notebooks, text/code editors, and other random destinations.
This article focuses on areas 1 through 4. If you’re a productivity nerd, a lot of this probably sounds familiar to you; I’m not going to rewrite Getting Things Done, but rather share my thoughts and the tools I use for this.
Area 1: Capture
Almost everything in your life is just another fucking inbox.
Capture is about wrangling the information that comes at you, in a high-trust environment, with regular review to ensure nothing important slips through the cracks. It is the foundation for an LMS, a continual survey of your inboxes for things that need your time and attention.
Your job is to continuously improve the signal-to-noise ratio of your inboxes. Be ruthless with the delete button and unsubscribe link; turn off notifications with extreme prejudice.
Tools I Use:
On the go, I use a passport-sized Traveler’s Notebook with a dot-grid notebook, folder pockets and zipper case, and a Kaweco AL Sport fountain pen. This is best for when I need to jot something down quickly, but it is somewhat bulky to have on me at all times. Using the passport-size TN with the card/zipper pocket lets me use the thing as a wallet, at least.
Digitally, I capture fleeting notes in Obsidian, or capture random to-dos in Things 3.
Area 2: Time Management
Time management is about organizing when things are happening. Meetings and appointments live here, but I also try to schedule focus time and longer tasks, as well as things like travel time when something requires my displacement in meatspace.
This is important, as visualizing the temporal component really makes it clear that I can’t tackle everything on my list.
Tools I Use:
In the past, I’d tried using an A6 Hobonichi Techo, but A6 is just too small for me to work with. My paper planner lives on my desk, and can therefore be larger; I picked up an A5 Hobonichi Cousin to plan and organize my time commitments, track daily habits, and keep a simple log of what I do at work.
Digitally, it’s Fantastical. This is hands-down the best calendar app available for iPhone and Mac. It lets me hide non-meetings on my work calendar (like “Holiday Office Closure”) or combine duplicate events that live on two calendars.
An aside on the duplicate events thing: I use a “Family” calendar for events that involve the household, like medical appointments, and a “Personal” calendar for events that only I need to be aware of. If I’m driving my wife to an doctor’s appointment, for example, it’ll go on the Family calendar, and I’ll also add it to my Personal calendar with a ”travel time” component, so I know when I need to leave.
Area 3: Task Management
If time management is the when, task management is the what. Key to this is making sure that the task is something that will be completed in a single step —you don’t want this carried forward day after day because it’s actually a project — and that it completely describes what needs to be done. You don’t want to revisit it weeks or months later and wonder what the hell “contact J for thing” meant.
I track two types of tasks.
First, there’s the general administrivia. Taking out the recycling, completing a survey on last week’s Town Hall, and what groceries I need to pick up fall under this category. This is the Keep The Lights On (KTLO) stuff that needs doing.
The other is Important Work I need to do to complete a major project or meet a goal. This is self-mastery, the will-matter-in-five-years stuff; work that will make positive progress in health, wealth, and relationships.
Tools I Use:
This stuff tends to be organized digitally. I review and organize Important Work in Things 3, and mostly use Apple’s Reminders app for the KTLO stuff.
On paper, the Important Work tasks go into a to-do list in the Hobonichi’s daily pages: two or three items, tops.
Important Work is reviewed weekly; I’ve written about how I do that on LinkedIn, if you’re curious.
Area 4: Information Management
Once you know what you’re doing and when, then you need access to the resources —notes, PDFs, URLs, photos, &cet.— that help you execute the task. I use a modified version of Tiago Forte’s PARA Method to organize everything.
Tools I Use:
Information management doesn’t work very well in analogue for me —search is far more effective across digital assets— so to keep on top of my notes and resources, I rely on the aforementioned Obsidian. It’s my favourite note-taking app, and I’ve recently been going through Joshua Duffney’s How To Take Smart Notes in Obsidian playlist on YouTube to tweak things for more of a Zettelkasten setup.
So that’s it. As the Hobonichi is a new addition to my approach, I’ll dig into it a bit more next week.
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