If you’d rather have this on your phone but don’t want to buy another app, I’d point you at iOS Reminders. It’s free, it’s already on your phone if you’re on an iPhone, and it’s genuinely capable enough to run this whole method without needing anything else installed.
Here’s what changes from the paper system and what doesn’t. Some of what the paper asks you to do by hand, Reminders does automatically. Dates are the big one, instead of a calendar you check by hand every morning, Reminders can notify you the moment something becomes due, and can create a view that shows everything due today or overdue, with only a little setup required. What doesn’t change is the actual hard part. Reminders still can’t blend a domain’s importance, a project’s importance, and a task’s importance into one overall value, no app that isn’t built specifically for that can. So the same structural work paper asks of you, ranking your domains and projects once, and walking that structure in order, still has to happen here too. The screen just makes the walk a little faster and keeps a few things honestly current without you having to check.
That ordering work is the whole trick, same as paper. You’re not ranking anything while you’re actually trying to get work done, the sidebar just holds the answer from here on.
Now, go through the task list you built in Parts 2 and 3, one task at a time, and add each one as a reminder in the list for its project.
Priority and tags. Set each reminder’s priority, Low, Medium, or High, and you can sort any list by priority to see it in that order. This is your High, Medium, Low zones from the paper version, just native to the app instead of drawn on a page. Tags are worth using too, and they’re a real advantage paper genuinely doesn’t have: add a tag like #phone or #waiting-on-sam to any reminder in any list, and you can pull up everything with that tag across your entire system at once, something a binder can only do by physically duplicating a task onto more than one page.
A start date is somewhat easier handled by the app instead of by hand with one small catch worth knowing about. If something can’t start until a future date, leave it in the Blocked list rather than moving it to its project list yet, give it that date instead of a due date, and tag it #start so you can tell the two apart at a glance. Keeping it in the Blocked list matters, not just the tag, if it sat directly in its real project list instead, it would still show up, priority and all, the moment you sorted that list by priority during your daily lap, exactly the thing a Blocked zone exists to prevent on paper. Reminders doesn’t have a separate field for “when this becomes ready” the way a due date has its own field, so the tag and the holding pattern together are what keep a start date from acting like a real deadline before it should. Reminders will surface in “Today” once that day arrives and can notify you, so there’s no calendar to check every morning for what’s now startable. When a #start-tagged item shows up in Today, that’s your cue to finally process it, move it out of the Blocked list into its real project list, and only add a genuine due date if one actually exists. This is exactly the piece paper can’t do on its own, even with the one small workaround.
The catch list, same idea as paper, digital form. When something occurs to you add it to the Catch List with nothing more than a title. Don’t stop to figure out which project it belongs to, or set a priority, or add a date, that’s the whole point, it’s off your mind the moment it’s written down anywhere. When you sit down to process it, work through the list one item at a time: decide which project it belongs to, move it to that list, set its priority, and add a date if it has one. Once it’s moved, it’s off the Catch List.