The Focus Journal has been designed to allow you to organize your notes in a way that suits your needs. There are also several tricks you can apply to organize your notes even further, and one of our all time favourites is colour coding using highlighters. Colour coding serves as a mental shortcut in order to organize your tasks according to priority, type, or whatever methodology works best for you. Below are five ways you can highlight your way to an even more organized day!
- Colour code after you write all the tasks of the day: You might be tempted to highlight your notes while jotting them down, however it’s better to write down all your tasks for the day, and then highlight your notes when you’re done.
- Be consistent: Use the same “highlighting colour code” throughout your journal, in order to visually prepare your mind for the colouring system you have in place. Red can be for urgent, green for action items, blue for personal. Once you’re consistent with the colours used, colour significance will become second nature to you.
- Limit your colour palette: Don’t overdo the colours! That will confuse your mind and make you less productive. Use 3 colours at most, and perhaps a fourth if you’re including personal tasks in your journal.
- Invest in good quality highlighters: Highlighters aren’t expensive, but it’s tempting to buy even cheaper ones sometimes. However, low quality highlighters might leak, ruining your notes. Invest in good quality ones, they’ll last for a while!
- Don’t mark an entire page with the same highlighting colour: Might seem obvious, but there were times when all my tasks had the same priority, and I had an entire page of yellow highlighted notes! If there’s no reason to highlight, no need to do so!