I've tried most of these. Some stuck. Most didn't. Here's what actually separates them.
This isn't a ranking. Different systems solve different problems, and the one that works for you depends on what's actually breaking in your current workflow. Read the problem description for each one first — if it doesn't sound like your problem, the system probably isn't for you.
1. GTD — Getting Things Done
The problem it solves: You have commitments everywhere — email, Slack, sticky notes, your head — and no single place that holds all of them. You spend mental energy remembering things instead of doing them.
Core idea: Capture everything into one trusted system. Process it into actionable next steps. Review it regularly. Your brain is for thinking, not storage.
How it works in Notion:
Build four databases: Inbox (raw capture), Projects (multi-step outcomes), Next Actions (single physical tasks), and Reference (non-actionable information). Everything you capture goes to Inbox first. During your daily review you process each item into one of the other three. Nothing stays in your head.
What it's genuinely good at: Handling complexity. If you're juggling 10+ projects across multiple life areas — work, side projects, family, health — GTD scales better than anything else on this list because it has explicit rules for every type of input.
Where it breaks down: The setup is involved, and the weekly review is non-negotiable. Skip it for two weeks and the whole system becomes untrusted. Most people find the processing step (deciding what something is and where it goes) more friction than they expected.
Best for: Senior developers, consultants, or anyone whose job involves managing a lot of incoming requests across multiple contexts simultaneously.
2. PARA Method
The problem it solves: You have information everywhere and can't find anything when you need it. Your notes, projects, and resources all blend together.
Core idea: Organize everything into four categories — Projects (active, deadline-driven), Areas (ongoing responsibilities), Resources (reference material by topic), Archives (inactive stuff). The key insight: information should be organized by how actionable it is, not by what topic it belongs to.
How it works in Notion:
Four top-level pages: Projects, Areas, Resources, Archives. Every note, document, and database lives inside one of these. Projects have a clear end state and a deadline. Areas are ongoing (health, finances, career). Resources are topics you're interested in. Archives is everything else you want to keep.
What it's genuinely good at: Organizing reference material. If you take a lot of notes, save a lot of articles, and do a lot of research, PARA gives you a filing system that actually makes sense at retrieval time.
Where it breaks down: PARA is an organizational system, not a task management system. It tells you where to put things, not what to work on next. Most people combine it with GTD or a simpler daily task method.
Best for: Knowledge workers, researchers, writers, and developers who do a lot of note-taking and need their reference material organized.
3. Bullet Journal Method (BuJo)
The problem it solves: Digital systems feel overengineered. You open your task manager and spend more time organizing tasks than doing them.
Core idea: A simple analog-inspired logging system using rapid logging — short, coded entries (tasks, events, notes) in a running log. Daily log, monthly log, future log. Migrate unfinished tasks forward or drop them if they no longer matter.
How it works in Notion:
Create a Daily Log database with date, entry type (task/event/note), content, and status. Add a Monthly Log page as a simple calendar view. Add a Future Log page for things more than a month out. Use simple symbols: • for task, ○ for event, — for note, × for completed, > for migrated.
What it's genuinely good at: Forcing prioritization. The migration process (rewriting unfinished tasks each day) is intentionally tedious — it makes you ask whether the task is actually worth carrying forward. Things that aren't important naturally drop off.
Where it breaks down: Notion isn't a great fit for BuJo's rapid, freeform nature. The original is analog for a reason. The digital version loses a lot of the feel. It also doesn't scale well to complex projects.
Best for: Developers who are overwhelmed by complex systems and want something minimal that forces them to prioritize daily.
4. Zettelkasten
The problem it solves: You read and learn constantly but none of it connects. Your notes are a graveyard of things you've forgotten.
Core idea: Every note is atomic (one idea only), written in your own words, and linked to related notes. Over time the links between notes create an emergent knowledge graph — ideas connect in ways you didn't anticipate when you wrote them.
How it works in Notion:
One database for all notes. Each note has a unique ID, a title, the content (in your own words, never copy-paste), and a relations field linking to other notes. Add a "Source" field for where the idea came from. Browse using the graph or by following links from one note to another.
What it's genuinely good at: Long-term knowledge development. If you're doing deep learning — reading books, papers, building expertise over years — Zettelkasten makes old knowledge findable and combinable in new ways.
Where it breaks down: High upfront cost per note. Writing everything in your own words and linking it properly takes time. It rewards patience. Most people give up before the network is dense enough to feel useful.
Best for: Developers who write, research, or want to build deep expertise in a technical domain over years.
5. Time Blocking
The problem it solves: Your calendar is full of meetings but your actual work — the deep, focused kind — never gets scheduled. It gets squeezed into whatever gaps are left.
Core idea: Treat your time like a budget. Every hour of your workday is assigned to a specific type of work in advance. Deep work blocks are protected, not optional.
How it works in Notion:
A simple weekly template with time blocks as rows and days as columns. Color-code by block type: deep work (green), meetings (red), admin (yellow), buffer (gray). Each morning, fill in what you'll actually do in the deep work blocks. Review at end of day — did reality match the plan?
What it's genuinely good at: Protecting maker time. For developers, uninterrupted blocks are the only time meaningful work gets done. Time blocking makes those blocks explicit and defensible.
Where it breaks down: Requires a calendar that you actually control. If your day is dominated by meetings you can't move, time blocking helps less. Also breaks down badly when things run over — the rest of the day cascades.
Best for: Developers with some control over their schedule who want to protect their deep work time.
6. Kanban
The problem it solves: You have too much in progress at once. You're working on six things simultaneously and finishing none of them. Work piles up in columns nobody reviews, and there's no shared language for what "in progress" actually means.
Core idea: Visualize the entire flow of work — not just tasks, but the stages they move through. Limit work in progress at every stage, not just the doing column. When something is blocked, the block is visible to everyone immediately. The system pulls work forward based on capacity rather than pushing it in based on demand.
How it works in Notion:
A Board view of your Tasks database. Columns represent stages in your actual workflow — not just Backlog, Doing, Done, but the real stages your work moves through: Backlog, Defined, In Progress, In Review, Done. Each column has an explicit WIP limit you set and respect. Cards show the information that matters at each stage — assignee, priority, due date, blocker flag. You can add a Blocked status that surfaces stuck work immediately rather than hiding it inside a column where it looks like progress.
What it's genuinely good at: Making flow problems visible. Kanban doesn't just show what you're working on — it shows where work slows down, stacks up, or stops moving. A column with 8 cards in it when the WIP limit is 3 tells you exactly where your bottleneck is. You can't ignore it because it's right there on the board.
Where it breaks down: Kanban requires consistent discipline around WIP limits and column definitions. If everyone adds cards freely and WIP limits become suggestions, the board degrades into a visual task list with no actual flow control. It also requires honest column definitions — if "In Review" means different things to different people, the board lies.
Best for: Developers working on teams or managing multi-stage workflows where the bottleneck isn't the work itself but the movement of work between stages. Also effective for solo developers who notice they start many things and complete few of them.
7. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
The problem it solves: You're productive on a day-to-day basis but you're not sure if the work you're doing is moving toward anything meaningful. Busy but not purposeful.
Core idea: Set a small number of ambitious Objectives (qualitative, inspiring). Under each, define 3–4 Key Results (measurable outcomes, not tasks). Review quarterly. The task list serves the OKRs — not the other way around.
How it works in Notion:
An Objectives database with a rollup to a Key Results database. Each Key Result has a target value, a current value, and a progress percentage. Link tasks from your task database to Key Results so you can see which work is contributing to which outcome.
What it's genuinely good at: Alignment. If you're working on side projects or building a product, OKRs force you to be explicit about what success looks like before you start working.
Where it breaks down: Overkill for day-to-day personal task management. The overhead of maintaining OKR tracking is only worth it if the work is complex enough to drift from its goals without explicit measurement.
Best for: Indie developers, founders, or anyone running a project with multiple contributors and a need to stay aligned on direction.
8. The One Thing Method
The problem it solves: Priority lists of 10 items aren't priorities. Everything feels equally important and you make slow progress on all of it.
Core idea: Every day, identify the single most important thing you could do — the thing that, if done, would make everything else easier or unnecessary. Do that first. Everything else is secondary.
How it works in Notion:
The system is intentionally minimal. A simple daily page with one field: "The One Thing today is ___." Below it, your regular task list. The One Thing gets done before you open email, Slack, or anything reactive.
What it's genuinely good at: Cutting through noise. If you're prone to busywork — clearing low-value tasks to feel productive — forcing yourself to name one high-leverage thing each morning is a direct countermeasure.
Where it breaks down: Doesn't scale to complex project management. Works best as a daily ritual layered on top of another system, not as a standalone approach.
Best for: Developers who know what their high-leverage work is but consistently deprioritize it in favor of easier tasks.
9. Full Life OS / Second Brain
The problem it solves: Your life has too many dimensions — work, health, finances, relationships, learning, side projects — and they each live in different places. There's no single place to see the whole picture.
Core idea: Build a unified personal operating system in Notion that tracks everything. One workspace, all areas of life, all databases linked. The goal is complete externalization of your mind into a trusted, searchable, connected system.
How it works in Notion:
A home dashboard with quick links to every area. Separate databases for: work tasks, personal tasks, goals, habits, finances, health metrics, relationships, projects, notes, learning, journal. Everything linked. Rollups showing cross-database statistics on the home page.
What it's genuinely good at: Completeness. If you want one place for everything and you're willing to invest in building and maintaining it, a Life OS eliminates the problem of fragmented information across apps.
Where it breaks down: The maintenance burden is real. A Life OS only works if you actually update it daily. It's also easy to spend more time building the system than using it — especially in Notion, where building is enjoyable and feels productive.
Best for: Developers who want full coverage and are disciplined enough to maintain a complex system consistently.
10. DevHub — Gamified Developer System
The problem it solves: You've tried most of the systems above. They work for a week, then you stop opening them. The work doesn't change — but your motivation to track it does. Traditional productivity systems provide no positive reinforcement for doing the work they're supposed to help you do.
Core idea: Apply game design psychology to developer workflows. Tasks earn XP. Projects are quest lines. Bugs are Glitch Purges. Learning is a skill tree. Your character sheet tracks your growth as a developer over time. The system makes progress visible and rewarding in a way checkboxes never can.
How it works in Notion:
Six interconnected databases: Tasks, Projects, Learning Paths, Docs, Bug Tracker, Character Sheet. Tasks link to projects. Learning links to projects (so you can see why you're learning something). Bugs link to tasks. Everything rolls up to a character sheet showing total XP, current level, quests completed, glitches purged, learning hours, and streak.
What it's genuinely good at: Retention. Most productivity systems fail not because they're poorly designed but because they're not motivating enough to use consistently. The gamification layer solves the motivation problem without changing the underlying work structure.
Where it breaks down: Not for everyone. If you find the RPG framing gimmicky rather than motivating, this will feel like friction. The system also requires some upfront setup to get the databases connected correctly.
Best for: Developers, engineers, and technical creators who know what they should be doing but struggle to maintain consistent productivity system usage over weeks and months.
Which one should you actually use?
The answer depends on which problem statement hit closest to home when you read through the list above.
If your problem is too much incoming work across too many projects: **GTD or PARA.
If your problem is **work moves slowly through your pipeline and you can't see why: Kanban.
If your problem is you're productive but not purposeful: OKRs or The One Thing.
If your problem is you take lots of notes but can't find them: Zettelkasten.
If your problem is every system you try lasts two weeks: DevHub.
The worst thing you can do is pick the most complex system and try to set it up perfectly before using it. Pick the one that matches your actual problem, use it for 30 days in its simplest possible form, then decide what to add.
A free version of DevHub is available if you want to try a pre-built version of system 10 without setting up the databases yourself.
What system are you using right now? Drop a comment — genuinely curious what's working and what isn't.
