Welcome to a simpler way to be more productive…starting TODAY!

The Today System is a productivity system designed around the simplest of tools: a 3 x 5 index card. It starts as a simple task list, but becomes a whole lot more.

It’s designed to start by focusing only on what you can do today to move you toward where you want to be, and it builds out from there.

It’s a way to motivate you to be more productive, as well as a way to measure your productivity each day. It does 4 simple but important things:

  • Provides and sustains your focus on the important things for you to do today
  • Acts as a physical source of motivation throughout the day
  • Establishes a productivity measurement system based on what’s important to you
  • Helps you prioritize each day and represent those priorities in a tangible way

There are 4 levels of the system, and you can stay at any one of them for as long as you like. But the way to get the most out of the system is by progressing up to Level 4.
(Click any of the levels below to go right to it)

This guide is meant to walk you through the different levels.

It’s easy to get started. Just grab a lined index card and something to write with.

Level 1: The Today Card

In its simplest form, the Today System centers around filling out a 3 x 5″ index card–called The Today Card–each day. Here’s how you do it:

  1. Assemble a list of your (at most) 9 most important items to do today.
  2. Assign a possible points value to each item based on its importance.
  3. Commit to doing only what’s on that card unless something unforeseen and more important comes up.
  4. As you complete each item, cross it off and award yourself the points for it.
  5. At the end of the day, calculate your points and your effective batting average.
  6. Track you score each day in the spreadsheet by this formula: points actual/points possible. Shoot for a minimum .750 score.

Prep Your Card

Grab a lined 3×5 index card and make it look like the picture below:

A card, prepared for your day.
  • Use whatever format you like for the date, just so long as you capture both the day and date—as well as the year (which becomes important once you’ve been using this system for a long time).
  • The “P” and “A” columns to the far right should be only big enough to fit a single-digit number in each, but not bigger. You’ll want as much space to the left of them as you can have.

Populate your card with actions

  1. Flip the index card to the unlined side, and position it in portrait mode.
  1. Take 5 minutes and write on that blank side of the card a list of the things that you believe are important to get done today—in no particular order. By “important” I mean things that may not be urgent, but things that will move forward your most worthy goals or projects. 
    (note: If you’re already using another productivity system or have a list of actions to do, you can simply pull items from that pre-existing list)
  2. Flip back to the lined side of the card. Place a number “1” on the left hand side of your first line of the card. In that number one slot, write the most important task you can do today—one that will make the most impact on your most important goals.
  3. Place a number “2” on the next line, and place the 2nd most important task on the line. It’s the task that if you could only do 2 things today, would be right behind the first item you wrote down.
  4. Repeat steps 1 and 2 for as many items as you deem important for you to do today. One task per line. Your limit is 9 (for thoughts on why, check the FAQ below).
  5. Once you have all the items on your card, place the number of the last item on your list in the “P” column of the first item. For instance, if you have 7 items on your list, item 1 gets 7. Item 2 gets 6, and so on down to item 7—which gets 1.

This represents your possible points for each task, and the P values of those items summed up represents your total points for the day. Your card should look like this:

A card filled out to guide your day.

Tips for Filling Out Your Card

  • Use the 1.25x rule
    Look at your calendar before you begin filling out your tasks, to understand how much time you have available to take care of tasks on your initial big list. If you’re in meetings, picking up and dropping off kids, making dinner, and cleaning up for all but 2 hours today—consider a maximum of 3 items. Don’t put yourself under undue pressure.
    I like to use the rule of no more than 1.25 items per hour of free time.
  • Favor push items over pull items.
    A push item is one that you need to make happen, as opposed to going to a meeting that’s been set up already. A pull item is one that either happens due to habit, or takes little effort or motivation for you to do. Meeting with someone when the meeting is already on your calendar—that’s a pull item, and not worth putting on your card. The exception would be when you’re notoriously bad about making meetings—in which case, put it on the card to motivate you to finally follow through!
  • Batching and time-blocking can help.
    The lines on your card are spaces—which you can fill up with whatever it is you want to track and motivate yourself to do. There’s definitely a use-case for batching, meaning you can put a few items on one line. Just don’t go overboard.
    There’s also a use-case for time-blocking. You can simply write “spend at least 45 min. on the big presentation” on a line of the card. And if you actually do it, you get the points. This is great for tasks where you’re just not sure what the work really is, but you know that making progress is important.

Review and Commit

Review the items on your card in order. Take a deep breath in, and let it out slowly. Let it sink in that if you follow what’s on this card, you can feel really good about how your day went. You’ve made the hard decisions. Now you just need to do the work.

Commit to yourself that this card will be your guide for the day. Commit to looking at it during the day for guidance on what to work on next.

Now Get to work!

Using the Scoring System

A primary feature of the card is the points system. The “P” column is your possible points for today. The “A” column is your actual points. When you complete a task, cross it off and put the amount of points earned in the “A” column.

If you made an honest effort, but only got the task halfway done, you can earn half the point value in the “P” column. So if you had 7 tasks for the day, and you were working on task #1 (which is worth 7 points), but you didn’t get it totally completed, you can put 3.5 in the “A” column. I’ve found that this mitigates the possible harmful effects of all-or-nothing thinking that already derail so much of our productivity efforts.

As you complete the most important tasks on the list, you get points. As you complete lower priority items on the list, you get points—but not as many as for the higher priority items.

The End of the Day

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of your first day using the Today Card. Now it’s time to tabulate your score, so you can see how well you did.

For each item you completed, be sure it’s crossed off, and you’ve placed the point value in the “A” column for that item. If you put in real effort on an item, but didn’t quite finish it, you can give yourself half of the possible point value for that item. You should get some credit for pushing yourself to work on it.

Add up your actual points and place that number in the bottom of the “A” column. Divide that by the total number of “P” points. Place that decimal (highest score being 1.000) in the box at the center bottom. That decimal is your score for the day. It’s your win %. It tells you how well you did at doing the things you identified as most important to you today.

A fully scored card at the day’s end should look like this:

Level 2: The Today Card + The S3

After Level 1, you’ll benefit from building out a minimal system around the daily card.

  1. Solidifying the habit of filling out the card each morning.
  2. Keeping track of the potential items that could go on a card for any given day.
  3. Using your score each day as a way to refine what you put on the card the next day.

Just filling out a card with the most important items to take care of, and aiming for a high score each day, was a huge help for me. But it was even more helpful to have a list of tasks lined up that I could put on my cards each day.

You could use a standard “next actions” list — unordered and perhaps with contexts (like “@office” or “@phone”). But for me, that proved to be too overwhelming. I needed a way to queue up the things I should be working on first, things to work on after that, and further down the line. So I built what I call a Simplified Scheduling System, or “S3”.

A Simplified Scheduling System (S3) is a list of all the things you want to get done, separated into 4 temporal categories:

  • Today +
    (this list feed the card each day)
    The items you deem most important to try to get done today, or tomorrow, if you don’t think you’ll be able to get them all done today.
  • Next Few Days
    The items that should get attention during the next few days. They should move up as items get on to the Today Card and get completed.
  • This Week
    Items that should get taken care of in the next 7 days or the current week — however you define that.
  • Next Week and After
    This category is more of a parking lot for things that need to be on your radar, but not quite yet — at least until other items this week are taken care of.

If you don’t have a list of projects already, the S3 is simply your place to dump all the things you need to do as you become aware of them. As you complete items, or as they become more important, move them up the schedule. As things become less important, move them down.

It helps to review the S3 regularly. How you gage where items need to be in the list is up to you. But don’t let that list go stale. It should reflect — at any given time — the relative order of importance of tasks in the queue.

Level 3: The Card + The S3 + The Scorekeeping Sheet

Filling out a card each day, and keeping an updated list of roughly scheduled items is already super helpful. The gamification of each day was a huge boon to my productivity. I found myself pushing to get the best score I could each day — based on the items and possible points on my card.

But after a while, I became more interested in tracking my longer-term scoring trends. For instance: 

  • how am I doing over the course of a given week?
  • how does my score for this week compare to my score from last week?
  • what’s my career score?
  • what can I learn from all these trends that I can put into action going forward?

For the purposes of answering these questions, I created a Google Sheets spreadsheet with 2 tabs. (You can download a template here.)

The first tab is a Daily Scores tab. It simply populates the week number (1–52), the day and date, and the provides a space to input the possible points for each day, and the actual points earned each day. It then calculates the score for the day. The last column allows for notes about the day — which I use to record my thoughts about how it went. I usually explain why I got the score I did, and what that might be telling me.

A screenshot of the Daily Scores tab from my own personal scorekeeping sheet

In an orange cell up top, it has a formula that calculates my “running average.” It’s the sum of all the points earned divided by the sum of all the possible points. I personally place a lot of importance on this number. If I can get that lifetime score to at least .750, and keep it there, I consider that doing quite well.

The Weekly Notes tab is for reflecting on your week over week performance. It automatically calculates your score for each week (using the week number column in the Daily Scores tab). It calculates how your score this week compares to last week. It also has columns for 3 key pieces of reflection to make sure the score serves as something actionable.

  • Week notes
  • Why the change from last week to this week?
  • What should I focus on in the coming week to sustain or improve my score?
A screenshot from the Weekly Notes tab in my own personal scorekeeping sheet

The Weekly Notes tab should be part of a weekly reflection process. It’s much simpler than a weekly review in GTD, and it’s more like a combination of a journal and a quantitative self-analysis, combined with a forward-looking plan of attack for the coming week.

Level 4: The Card + The S3 + The Scorekeeping Sheet + The Goals/Projects List

Even at Level 1 — just filling out the daily card — the concept of importance is central. That is, the most important tasks you’re aware of should be on your card today. And the most important of those tasks should be at the top of your card. The more important the item, the more points it’s worth.

But how do you figure out what’s important? You can rely on your gut — which at times can be a pretty good guide. Or you can systematize things a bit more. That’s where Level 4 comes in. 

Level 4 is about doing more than just tracking the tasks in your life. It’s about tracking your projects (which involve multiple tasks), and sorting them into those that directly serve your goals and those that don’t.

Just like getting any old tasks done isn’t a great measure of productivity, neither is simply getting any old projects done. But getting the right projects done — and getting the wrong ones off your plate — is what productivity is all about.

I have 4 major, long-term goals at the very top of my list of projects. As I review my projects each week, I ask myself which projects serve those goals, and which don’t. By each project that directly serves one of my goals, I put a #G next to it. By those that don’t, I put an #NG. I try to minimize the amount of #NG projects that stay on my list.

My S3 list contains primarily items that fall under #G projects. And when I fill my card out each day, the top 2 items on the card (those worth the most points) are actions that serve #G projects. My goals dictate what’s important, which dictate how much things on my card are worth. So my score each day, each week, and beyond reflect how much I’m serving my goals each day. That is the very definition of productivity — spending each day working on your goals.

Once you have a master action list and a project list categorized into (#G) and (#NG) projects, you can do some next-level card-creation.

flowchart of the Today System

Make it stick!

Join our community on Discord to get the benefit of working with others who are making this system a part of their lives. Post your score and a picture of your card each day. Talk about your week in review and your own MEPS. But most of all, stay motivated to fill out a card each day!

Questions?

Head over to the FAQ to find answers to your questions.

Can’t find your particular question answered? Submit your question at the top of the FAQ page!