Introduction

P1.express is a draft now. Please submit your comments in the comment section below or email them to us: info@omimo.org
The review stage ends on 2025-11-01.

P1.express is a libre, minimalist task management method for individuals. It’s

• a method, not software: You can implement it with various software or even without any software.
• a method, not a guide: It gives you a step-by-step approach.
• minimalist: It focuses on the essentials and avoids clutter.
• libre: There are no copyright restrictions for you.

Goal

The goals of P1.express are

• to reduce the cognitive load, overwhelm, and stress of managing your tasks,
• to make your work more visible to you, and
• to help you focus on what matters to you.

An efficient task management system helps you save time and mental energy. You can invest the extra time and energy on having a more pleasant and successful personal and professional life.

P1.express is not a substitute for project, program, or portfolio management. For those, you will also need the other OMIMO modules or management modules from other resources.

The nature of tasks

The content of your task management system can consist of things to do, places to visit, ideas to explore, problems to solve, conversations to have, books to read, reminders to build or change habits, or anything else. P1.express simply calls all of them “tasks” and doesn’t differentiate between them, except according to whether they’re recurring or one-time tasks.

Target audience

P1.express might be useful to many people, but it’s designed for people who have more than one major source of tasks that are not fully managed by someone else. These sources can be projects, programs, and operations created by various organizations or by yourself, related to your professional work, hobbies, or friends and family, etc.

Postponing instead of prioritizing

Most task management systems sort tasks in an ordered list, from those that should be done first to those that will be done last. This is what P1.express refers to as a prioritizing system. Another meaning of “prioritizing” is to assign priority classes such as “low”, “medium”, and “high” to tasks, which is not the intended meaning in P1.express.

Prioritizing systems have been used more or less successfully for some finite sets of tasks without dependencies (e.g., some IT projects). However, your personal task management system isn’t finite. When prioritizing systems are used in such semi-infinite sets of tasks, some tasks will sink to the bottom of the list and will be buried there without you ever getting to them, because new tasks are added to the top of the list at more or less the same rate as you close tasks.

To avoid such buried tasks, P1.express uses a postponing system instead of a prioritizing one. This is how the postponing system works: Each day is planned the day before. In your daily planning, you’ll check all the tasks that were postponed to that day as well as tasks that remain from the day before. At that point, you’ll postpone the tasks you can’t do or don’t want to do the next day to a reasonable date in the future and keep the rest for the next day. Similarly, when you identify a new task during the day, you’ll create it in the system and then postpone it to a reasonable date when you can probably do it.

The P1.express process

P1.express has a process visualized in its diagram. This process has four cycles for yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily activities. The management activities are shown by small circles with codes such as “A1” written inside them.

As said before, you plan each day at the end of the previous day. The next day, you start working on your tasks and gradually close them. “Closing” means that there’s nothing else you want to do on the task because it’s “finished” or “closed”. These are different statuses of tasks, and there are four of them in P1.express: doing, postponed, finished, and canceled.

Besides closing tasks (activity D1 in the diagram), you would continuously identify new tasks as well (activity D2). The way you identify new tasks has a significant impact on your task management system, which makes D2 an important activity for you.

In addition to the tasks you’ve planned for the day, activity D3 runs a “lottery” and brings one of the postponed tasks to the current day for consideration. This activity is designed to break your routines and draw your attention to the diversity of ideas you have.

Finally, you’ll end the day by planning the next day in activity D4.

Besides the normal daily activities, there’s a weekly activity, C1, in which you check what you’ve done during the week, find sources of energy loss, and see how you can fix them.

You also have high-level, personal goal management in P1.express. It starts in A1, when you set and revise your goals. Then, based on those goals, you will clean up your list in A2. More importantly, in B1, you’ll check what you’ve done once a month and see how you’re moving toward your goals and whether you need to make any changes.

Initial overwhelm

You may feel overwhelmed after implementing any structured task management system. Sometimes, it’s not because of the system itself but because of unreasonable expectations you and others have of you, which are made visible with the help of the system. If so, instead of giving up on the system, use it to manage those expectations and gradually make them more realistic.

Metadata

The metadata you need to have for each task in P1.express, besides its title, is very limited: the date, whether a task is recurring, and the frequency of the recurring tasks.

You may be urged to add extra metadata such as categories, tags, and dependencies, but doing so doesn’t help most people and only makes their systems bloated and harder to work with. Don’t add extra chunks of metadata unless you’re sure the benefit of having them outweighs the trouble of using and maintaining them.

P1.express, like all OMIMO modules, is minimalist, meaning that it focuses on the essentials and avoids clutter.

Implementation

There are three general ways of implementing your task management system:

• Using pen and paper
• Using specialized software you can customize for P1.express
• Using the default software you already have on your laptop or desktop computer

P1.express doesn’t recommend any of these above the others and what the best option is for you depends on your personal preferences and skills as well as your external factors. Regardless of all the determining factors, you should keep your implementation clutter-free to ensure it’s as helpful to you as it can be.

The above three options are briefly introduced below. You shouldn’t rush into it, but rather take your time and consider all three before selecting the best one for you. The first option gives you a visual mental model of the system that can help you even when using the second or the third option.

Implementation option #1: pen and paper

You can implement P1.express without any software, just using pen and paper. To do so, write each task’s name on top of an index card, with its information below it. Leave a column for dates, and when postponing, finishing, or canceling the task, cross out the previous date and write the new date underneath it.

Have a box with separate spaces for the postponed, finished, and canceled tasks and a small board behind it for displaying the doing tasks. When moving a card to one of the sections in the box, make sure it’s sorted correctly among other cards, with later dates toward the back.

When the “finished” or “canceled” sections are full, you can open up space by archiving their oldest cards.

Implementation option #2: specialized software

There are many task management software packages. The following are major concerns in selecting one:

1. Is it compatible with P1.express? For example, flow boards (usually called Kanban boards) are incompatible with P1.express because they are for priority‑based systems that sort tasks in a linear list.
2. Your task management software should live long and serve you for many years. The shiny platform you’re considering may be obsolete a few years later.
3. Is your data safe in that software? Your system should prevent data loss and misuse to a degree reasonable for your case.
4. Is your data portable in that software? Some platforms make it difficult or nearly impossible to migrate your own data onto a new platform.
5. Is the software simple enough for it to become an organic part of your daily work without adding unnecessary overhead?

Implementation option #3: Zero-install software

If you don’t want to start using new software or prefer to keep your system as portable as possible without dependencies, you can implement P1.express using the basic software available in nearly all modern laptop or desktop computers. It can be specially interesting to power users who can make it more powerful and tailored to their needs by writing simple scripts.

For a zero-install implementation of P1.express, create four directories, one for each status of tasks in P1.express (postponed, doing, canceled, and finished). Create an empty text file for each task and enter its related information (if any) inside the file. In many desktop operating systems, you can right click on an empty place in your file explorer to open a context menu; that menu usually has an option like “New → Text Document” or “Create Document” that creates an empty file for you.

Your file and directory structure would look like the following:

The previous example uses the symbol “↻” to mark recurring tasks. You can, of course, use any other symbol or simply write “recurring” instead.

The tasks in the “postponed” directory are prefixed by the date when they will come back into the “doing” directory. Those in the “finished” and “canceled” directories are prefixed with the date they were finished or canceled. Use the ISO date format (yyyy-mm-dd) so that your files are sorted correctly.

If you need to have your task management system on multiple devices, you can sync it among them using solutions such as Syncthing, or use a cloud storage platform such as Nextcloud or CryptPad. (All three suggestions are free and open-source.)

You can use your mobile phone to access your task management system when you don’t have access to a proper computer, but it probably won’t work well as a primary way of working with this implementation.

Remember to set up some form of secure and safe backup and versioning for your task management directory. Power users can use a private Git repository for this purpose.