A brief history of the pitfalls and struggles that ended up leading me to create the Timeline System. And how Evernote helped me twice.

Years ago, when I worked for big corporations, I quickly realized how much of a problem it was not to have a good system for organizing information and keeping up with activities.

After trying many existing options, it became clear to me that they often felt rigid and unnatural, forcing users to adapt to the system rather than the other way around.

The closest I got to something that would work in a more intentional way was Agile, which I studied for many years. I ended up adapting some of its core concepts to Kanban boards, which I still use to help companies. But it is far from ideal for managing life. Anyway, this learning experience led me to Kaizen, which also heavily influenced the way I see mindful work.

Back to my journey. I knew my system needed to output information based on how we move things around. In addition to that, it had to do more than one thing with a single action from us, the users.

Some examples of the system accomplishing that are the auto-updated number of notes in the Action Containers and the dynamically created list of tasks, as shown in the video below.

Another important “discovery”, was the realization that time passes. In other words, there’s nothing we can do about it.

Time. Will. Pass.

The good news, is that it will democratically happen in the same way for all of us. However, if there’s no way to slow it down, accelerate it, or go back or forward, we are nothing but slaves to time. In other words, the most accurate representation of our lives is a timeline.

The third element was the recognition that human memory is much worse than many of us believe it to be. There are several great books on this topic, but there’s one I enjoyed the most: Memory Illusion by Julia Shaw. And that’s why I strongly believe that a system will only be truly efficient if it starts with good note-taking.

If we put all the above together, we have the Action Containers representing all the work in progress and, at the same time, clearly showing us the number of activities going on. Then, there’s the Static Containers, which help us with all the information we constantly need and wish we were able to always remember. Think of them as a memory caches.

Finally, there’s the Timeline, to where everything goes. That’s your long-term memory. It’s a representation of everything that happened in your life. And because it is chronologically ordered and categorized with tags, you can go to a specific moment and that will trigger other memories. Going there is like recollecting facts when someone shows you a picture of something you don’t remember happening. It’s almost a flashback experience.

If you haven’t, please watch the video below. It will help you understand the Timeline System dynamics.

Ditching the Kanban Board

Although notes are a much better way to store information, a Kanban board is unbelievably better at representing the current state of activities in progress. One might think that it is possible to address the problem by making cards as rich in information as notes. That’s technically possible using, for example, an Obsidian plugin that I tried for a while. However, it ends up creating another issue. We would require a multitude of boards to manage all aspects of our lives, which, in turn, makes the system excessively complex.

Notes it is

If you look back to my first videos, you will notice how I was struggling with making it work with multiple Filtered Notes Widgets on Evernote Home. I could never find a seamless solution, and Evernote made my life even harder when they removed Home from the mobile client. Yes, I’m aware that it is still there, but it is so many clicks away that it feels like it is not there.

Anyway, that forced me to go back to using the Shortcuts area to replicate the mess I created on Evernote Home. Little did I know that its constraints would push me in the direction of figuring out the solution that I had been seeking for a considerable amount of time. Interestingly, many years ago, after fighting with how Evernote organizes our notes, I realized how powerful chronology is.

Evernote’s features probably make it the best place to run the Timeline System, but I didn’t want it to be exclusive to one app. So the next step was to make it as simple as possible to enable it to run in as many apps as I could. 

That was not an easy task, but to be honest, the hardest part has been figuring out a way to explain how the system works and all its benefits in a way that it’s easy to understand. After so many years, it all happens naturally when I’m doing things or teaching my clients. But putting that in words has been a challenge.

Anyway, after the first video explaining how to set it up on Evernote, there’s now the one below explaining how I’m using the system on Obsidian.