The John Carmack plan

Earlier this year, I wrote about text files being the simplest project management tool.

Whist watching a video by Nick Janetakis about his notes application, I learned about a repository of John Carmack's plain text notes.

These are a collection of plain text files that he wrote to plan and track his tasks.

He uses a simple format to represent different types of tasks.

Lines without a prefix are to be done or in progress.

Lines prefixed with * were completed that day.

Lines prefixed with + were completed on a later day.

Lines prefixed with - were decided against on a later day.

I love the simplicity of this system, and how easy it is to add new entries.

Plain text files are also easy to search with tools like grep.

To find all open tasks, you can run a command like grep '^[^*+-]', and run similar commands to show different types of entries.

The simpler a system is to use, the more likely you are to stick with it.

This explains why there are 394 daily plan notes in that repository.