This reminds me of the plain text bujo I kept for about 1–2 years a few years back, only much prettier. Mine was a single long file that I appended to each day.

This reminds me of the plain text bujo I kept for about 1–2 years a few years back, only much prettier. Mine was a single long file that I appended to each day. Like in the post, I used pretty standard Unixy tools. I could search, aggregate, and bulk update. The rest was based on conventions and discipline. And migrating to new conventions was doable with a throwaway script. All in all, it was a liberating experience. Where it fell apart, and where I expect this approach might fall apart also: - While it worked really well on desktop, I didn't find a way to make it translate to mobile. Sure, I could just edit the plain text file, but that's not enough when you have hundreds of todos scattered around. - I had to remember too much about how all the different scripts worked together. I kept forgetting the commands I'd defined, especially when I was tired or stressed. My middleroad these days is NotePlan. It gives me what I liked about bullet journaling (for me it's the 'rapid logging' part) but presents it in a sleepless night-proof UI that works well on iOS at the same time.