Find Your Focus

What it’s About

Your Daily Page is a quick way to capture one day’s focus, suitable for printing or just keeping open in a browser.

The Longer Version

I’m just going to talk about my experience, because I’ve built this based on my own needs. I have a “Trusted System” where I capture todos, notes, and links to look into later. The problem is, I have a lot of responsibilities and a lot of interests. I currently have 224 items in that system—currently a Notion database with 20 different views for slicing and dicing.

Returning to that list, no matter how carefully I’ve filtered and sorted it, does not bring focus or inspiration. I’ve tried moving selected items into other systems, for example TaskPaper, but my milage has varied.

At the same time, I have had some success transferring a day’s worth of priorities to paper and using that as my reference throughout the day. I use a style loosely based on bullet journaling. The only problem is the overhead of the transfer and the inconsistency of the organization.

Daily Page solves for both of those issues. It allows me to quickly enter information into a pre-structured page ready for printing.

My ideal self, the ideal user, implements Cal Newport’s shutdown routine after a perfect day of spending large chunks of time in Deep Work, focused on What’s Important. As part of that shutdown routine, they visit their Super Powerful Trusted System (in my case, Notion). They review what they did and consider tomorrow. They click some things on Daily Page, the SPTS data snaps into a view that makes perfect sense to their brain. They can move into whatever the rest of their day looks like (in Cal Newport’s case, an idyllic evening spent with devote focus on their family and in reading approximately 10 books).

Roadmap

Soon™ I will create an Official Roadmap, but in the meantime, here are the things I myself need:

• A way to automatically, or at least quickly, import from my SPTS
• A way to customize the look of the Daily Page, such as:
  • the type of content in each block
  • some design elements of the page (color theme, fonts, background image, etc)
• A way to quickly and easily change the size of the printout. Notebooks come in a lot of different sizes and making your Daily Page fit in your existing paper system is important. Also letter-sized pages are just…big.
• Saving content across browsers/devices Done!

I welcome your feedback and bug reports. For now, please just email me using this form.

— Daniel