Practical implementation notesHere are a few practical implementation notes and workarounds, both for war boarding in general and for
Milanote, should you decide to use it to build your digital war board.
Build the war board habit.Your war board is an intentional environment, and the only way it'll work is if you develop the habit of using it each and every day.
There are a variety of ways to build the habit.
- Set an alarm to remind you to check your war board at the start of each work day (if you know you'll be at your desk by 9 AM, set an alarm to "Start with the war board" for 8:55).
- Pin your war board in your web browser so that it's always the first thing you see (direct war board overview link that bypasses the home page of Milanote).
- Make your war board link a prominent shortcut link (ideally, first place) on the home page of your web browser.
- Treat your war board as a sacred part of your daily routine. In my case, for example, my calendar, war board, and email inbox are my work/planning trifecta. Over time, I've developed the mindset that my war board is the most important of the three. It's where I'm deliberate and proactive (whereas my inbox and calendar are reactive). I want to control my time and attention, not have other people's priorities dictate to me. When I start with my war board, I know these are my plans, not someone else's.
- Create yourself a "big rock daily work block" that you protect at all costs. A focused hour early in your routine for each day, and before your day job or external obligations take over. Open your board during this window to anchor your mind to your high-level intentions and map your daily execution steps before reacting to the outside world.
Start small.The journey template and planning sequence is a good place for launching a war board. It provides just enough structure and a mix of longer- and shorter-term elements to keep you moving forward with purpose.
Don't try to use every variation of this system at once. Experiment. Find what works. Ignore the rest.
Simplicity and the ability to stick with it are the only things that determine whether this works for you.
Adapt the system to work for you.- If you hate long-term planning: Skip the 3–5 year section. Work only with 12–18 months and 90–100 days.
- If you don’t know your goals: Start with monkey mind. Your goals will emerge from your stuckness.
- If you’re neurodivergent: Use fewer boards, less copy, more visuals, and shorter time horizons.
- If your life is chaotic or unpredictable: Your war board becomes your anchor. Return to it whenever you can. No guilt.
- If you’re a chronic starter-but-not-finisher: You’re exactly who this system was built for.
Interesting side note here: I'm reading Temple Grandin's book,
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions. In it she says that about
45% of people are a mix of verbal and visual thinkers. Most systems lean verbal, which can make them hard to follow, much less stick with and execute, especially if you're a good mix of both or fall on the more visual end of the spectrum.
I think that's what I like about the
War Board Method so much—it's
a blend of visual and written elements, and you can lean heavier on one or the other, depending on how your brain works (and every single brain works differently).
Working with the quirks of MilanoteThe mobile inbox trickMilanote is a visually beautiful tool on a desktop, but complex visual boards can become clunky and difficult to navigate on a mobile screen.
To solve this, do not try to open more detailed boards on your phone.
Instead, build a simple, text-based board on your home screen called
"Inbox." (covered earlier).
When you're out and about, open the
Milanote app and navigate directly to the Inbox sub-board. Drop a quick note, photo, or link as a reminder for yourself, and then, when you get back to your desk, you can move any Inbox notes to their appropriate place within your full war board.
The "Unsorted" tab can serve the same purpose, if you prefer. I use them interchangeably.
The redundancy protocol (protecting your system)Your war board will become a deeply personal, incredibly valuable roadmap of your mind and life.
While cloud platforms are remarkably secure, data glitches do happen, and visual layouts can accidentally be shifted, too.
Here are a few steps you can take to secure your war board.
- Back up using screenshots. Not ideal, obviously, but better than nothing should a digital system fail. After a big planning and war boarding session (not necessarily from day to day), screenshot your full board (frame by frame) and paste them one by one into a Google document, Dropbox, or other separate tool for safekeeping.
- Export your boards regularly. On desktop, the "Export" link is easily accessible, and you can download each board as a PDF, PNG, Word document, Markdown, or plain text file, and you can also download all images and files within each board into a ZIP file.