2. Get a binder to hold everything, and a set of blank dividers, one for every domain you’re tracking. I recommend no more than 3 for the manual method.
3. Label each divider with a domain name, and place the dividers in the binder in order of importance, most important domain first.
4. Print about twenty project pages, for every project you’re tracking plus a few extra to have on hand, plus six copies of the calendar and six copies of the catch list.
5. Looking at your task worksheet, fill out the top of each project page with its project name and its impact for each project you identified.
6. File each project page behind its domain’s divider, in order of impact within that section, most important project first.
7. Put the catch list and the calendar as a two-page spread at the very front of the whole binder, ahead of every divider, catch list on the left, calendar on the right, so opening the binder shows both at once. Every start date and every due date, across every project, gets written on the calendar, and nowhere else.

That ordering work is the whole trick. If you ever decide that it needs to be updated all you have to do is adjust the project sheets relative position, or the domains position. You’re not ranking anything while you’re actually trying to get work done, you already did that at setup, and the binder just holds the answer physically from then on.

Each project page comes divided into four zones: High, Medium, Low, and Blocked. Blocked is only for tasks with a real future start date, something you already know is coming but genuinely can’t act on yet. It’s not where a multi-step chain waits its turn, that’s handled differently, described next.

With your pages set up and ordered, go through the task list you built in Parts 2 and 3, one task at a time, and write each one onto the page it belongs on, in the zone that matches its impact. If a task is really the first step of a longer chain, only write down the step you can actually act on right now, per the breadcrumb technique below.

Breadcrumbs, for tracking what depends on what. Don’t write down every step of a multi-step chain at once. Only the one step you can actually act on right now goes anywhere on the page. When that step is really the first of several, leave a breadcrumb right in its own name noting what comes next and the real deadline driving the whole chain, something like “draft chapter 3, next: send to editor, final due Friday.” The later steps don’t exist on the page at all yet, not even in Blocked. When you cross off the active step, that breadcrumb tells you exactly what to write down next, and which zone it belongs in, no re-deriving anything, and the deadline travels forward with it so a distant due date can still put real pressure on today’s step, not just on whichever one happens to be due next.

A catch point, for anything that occurs to you before it’s ready to be processed. This is the paper version of the catch-point from Part 5, capture now, shape later, that lives in your binder. The catch list has six columns: idea, next action, project, blocker, start date, and due date, plus a checkbox marking whether it’s been logged. When something occurs to you mid-day, a stray thought, a name, “taxes,” write it in the idea column and get back to what you were doing. Don’t stop to figure out which project it belongs to, or whether it’s blocked, or when it’s due, that’s exactly the point, the thought is off your mind the moment it’s written down anywhere, even before it’s fully shaped. When you sit down to process the list, work through the unlogged rows one at a time, fill in the next action, the project, anything blocking it, and its dates, transfer that onto the right project page and the calendar, and check the box. If carrying the whole binder everywhere isn’t practical, the catch list is the one piece worth keeping separate and genuinely pocketable, since capturing a thought is the one thing that has to happen wherever you actually are.