Daily planning in one tree

Most daily-planning systems collapse for one of two reasons. Either the plan lives in a different place than the work, so reality and the plan drift apart before lunch. Or planning costs so much ceremony that skipping it once becomes skipping it forever.

Planning inside your outliner attacks both. The plan is made of the same nodes as the projects it draws from, and "making the plan" is mostly moving things — which in a tree costs a keystroke.

The morning ritual (10 minutes)

1. Make today's node. One node, dated, at the top of a Days branch. Children: Top 3, Notes, Later. Zoom into it (⌘.) — for the next ten minutes this is your whole screen.
2. Sweep the inbox. Everything you captured since yesterday gets triaged: into projects, into today's plan, or deleted.
3. Pull, don't list. Walk your active project branches — zoom makes each one your whole screen — and pull the three /todo lines that matter most into today's Top 3. The discipline is in the number: three finished beats ten touched.
4. Check due cards. If the review queue has cards due, they're part of the day — five minutes of review with coffee is how the memory layer stays alive.

During the day

Work zoomed into today's node. Meeting notes, stray ideas, and sub-tasks land as children right where they happen — context attached by position, not by tagging discipline. When something turns out to be tomorrow's problem, drag it to Later. When a note turns out to be worth keeping forever, /card it on the spot.

If a second context intrudes — a bug report while you're writing, an errand mid-meeting — capture it as one line under Notes or Later and stay where you are. The evening close will route it; your focus doesn't have to.

The evening close (2 minutes)

Before closing the laptop: unfinished Top 3 items go back to their projects or to tomorrow — consciously, not by default. Anything left in Notes gets one pass: file it, card it, or delete it. Today's node is now a closed record, not an open wound.

That two-minute close is what makes the system compound: every day starts from zero open loops, and the Days branch quietly becomes a searchable journal of what actually happened — useful at weekly review time, and oddly comforting in December.

Why not a dedicated daily planner app?

Because the expensive part of planning is not the list — it's the connection between the list and the thinking behind it. A task called "finish pricing draft" is one node away from the pricing research, the constraints, and the half-written copy it refers to. No app-switching, no copy-paste, no "where did I write that down." One tree, zoomed to today.