I think my biggest problem with GTD, which I switched to after being a Franklin Planner user for many years (and with which I had this same problem) can be found in the second point of your definition of a project: A project has an outcome that is valuable, desireable, and well-articulated.

In a not-very-subtle way, this statement says clearly that there are individual things a person does and enjoys that really should not be. Unless you’re completely shameless, it’s hard to articulate the outcome, value, and desireability of a project like organize your porn collection (besides, why bother? Hard drives are cheap). And as someone who writes slash, it’s just as hard to articulate the outcome: adoring fans, outraged fans, or just a few “that was nice” emails, maybe? Nonetheless, these are projects that the people doing them take seriously; Covey was blatant about it, but many of the life-organizing processes subtly imply that pleasures are not “valuable” and so cannot be projects.

I did grab a mini-moleskein and have been using it with some success. I learned a pair of useful hacks for it: the first is that when I’m done with a TODO list (every item in it has been done or transferred forward to another list) I cut the corner off where you put the meta-information; it doesn’t show when I’m riffing through the book later. I also invested in a collection of book darts. The cloth page indicator is for today’s journal; book darts on the top indicate active “TODO” lists with the one furthest in being the most recent, and ones on the side point to project description pages. They’re much more elegant and handsome than post-it labels.