Action Journaling (AJ)
Richard Rathe, July 2022
I developed this todo List format in 2016. It allows you to easily translate from paper to digital—and back again! This approach is compatible with other journaling formats such as KIST, Bullet Journaling
and GTD.
AJ focuses on Action Items defined as discrete activities that can be performed, decided, or otherwise resolved. This is the lowest level of organization, a shopping list for example. The higher level Task is to go shopping. The shopping list is an aid for completing this task. It is possible to combine tasks into higher-level Projects (future).
Basics
In the most recent iteration I've distilled things down to the essentials.
- an action to be done
- an action for which there is urgency
- an action for which decision or additional information is needed
- a completed action
- an action that can be ignored for the moment (but not lost)
See the History section for what has changed.
Paper
There is a great deal of discretion when it comes to writing lists on paper. Here are the five basic AJ item types as they might appear on a handwritten todo list.

Digital
- AJ items are entered as they occur to the author, one per line.
- The first character (.!?~|) indicates the item type.
- Items will sort appropriately based on ASCII order.
- White space after the first character is ignored for readability.
- Software may collate, sort, or modify these items as needed.
- I recently added an option to specify list titles (!!).
- I recently changed the deferred indicator to (|).
The basic item types are shown here.
!! AJ Item Examples . open task (.) ! open priority task (!) ? open query/decision task (?) ~ completed task (~) | deferred/reassigned task (|)
- AJ Item Examples
- ☐open task (.)
- ☐!open priority task (!)
- ☐?open query/decision task (?)
- ☒completed task (~)
- ◊deferred/reassigned task (|)
History
I have used checkboxes for many years when writing notes and lists. The little squares serve as visual anchors no matter where they appear on the page! A few years ago I considered adopting the bullet journal format, but decided against it. My major criticism was its complexity… one has to build indexes, timeframes, and recopy items over and over. It struck me as too much work!
I've long had an interest in plain text markup languages, and was struck by the need for a compatible todo list format. Below are examples of my early work with these ideas, mostly based on bullet journaling and GTD.


As you can see I dropped the non-action note
(`) and combined the defer/delegate
(< >) items. In a paper system you'd probably just write out what you intended. A wide left column leaves plenty of room to do so, but there is no natural analog in the digital realm without using proprietary software.