[bArray]

My format used to be as follows:

    * [ ] YYYY-MM-DD
      * [ ] 1800: Dinner with parents
      * [x] Walk the dog
    * [ ] YYYY-MM-DD
      * [ ] 0900: Interview new recruit
        * [ ] Prepare interview questions
        * [ ] Upload result to HR system

This worked really well for me and was easily searchable. One benefit would be that it is easily trackable in Git.

These days I have a little A6 lined notebook and manually list tasks there. Each page is a new day and the tasks are listed similarly. The only modification is that sometimes I put some letters to theme a task, i.e.:

    * [ ] YYYY-MM-DD
      * [x] Home: Walk the dog

[james-bcn]

This is a much nicer format than the one in the linked article.

I think my approach would be to generate a file in Markdown, then import that into a good Markdown editor. You could generate it each week or month from a template, making it easier to add repeating tasks like exercise and dog walking.

[bArray]

I think the format I suggested would parse in markdown, but I created it pre-markdown.

For me the best parts are:

1. You could write a parser very quickly.

2. It's very easy to edit and add to as a human.

3. It can easily be tracked in git or via a diff-based tool.

I did already think about the repetitive tasks, a long time ago I used to have a tool that would look at the past tasks and recommend future tasks (with appropriate distributions). One example was booking a dentist appointment every 6 months, even if I forgot to schedule something it would remind me to book one in, dismiss it or push it back.

[apricot]

I use a small paper planner that I keep in my pocket at (nearly) all times. People are taken aback and ask why I don't use something more modern, but why should I? This works better, for me, than anything else I ever tried.

[tero]

It's unfair to computers how well paper planners worked. Among with todo.txt, paper calendars were an inspiration and a benchmark for writing calendar.txt.

[mock-possum]

Nested list of checkboxes in markdown is exactly how I organize my work days - I write it I every morning, and then review it every afternoon before I power down. It’s basically job-journaling, it helps fix everything in my head day-to-day.

[notdiaphone]

> These days I have a little A6 lined notebook and manually list tasks there. Each page is a new day and the tasks are listed similarly.

Periodically my task system fails (the Taskwarrior 3 disaster being the most recent) and this is pretty much what I end up using. But then I forget a bill or something important because there are no bells or buzzers keeping me as a useful working unit. Then I erect the previous system, or some variant, and go with that until some inevitable breakage sends me back to paper. So it goes...

[einpoklum]

This format is terrible for working with line-based tools; you need to go an unknown number of lines back to get the date or the time.

Although, TBH, the OP's suggestion of one-line-per-day puts too many items on the same ling. I would have gone with one line per event. Yes, there's more repetition, but you need no out-of-line context, you have to do a lot less parsing, and you can look at a fixed number of _columns_ and get the beginning of the description of each event, which is nicer for manual searching.

[bArray]

I think it's somewhat passable with line-based tools, i.e. you could easily use sed to match a range [1].

I think that it's far more important that it is human readable, if it becomes too tricky to edit manually, then just go with a database.

[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/236754

[krupan]

If you like this you might like org-mode

[setopt]

Why did you make the day itself into a checkbox? Did you use this for weekly reviews or something?

[bArray]

To mark the parsing of the day and to note that any incomplete tasks that I intend to keep have been re-planned to elsewhere. Any marked days are then there for historic purposes only.