1) Read all messages, watch battles, look at the map in general, look for found sites.
2) Blood slaves - to lab or transporters, gems from items - to lab. I prefer not to click the pool button, since it can remove some important gems/slaves that shouldn't be removed. Besides I just like to see all this income 'in person'.
Give obvious forged items to commanders. Moving scouts.
3) After some critical point in the game (first war maybe? don't know) here I usually just shut down the game and go to work/sleep.
4) When thoughts on the next turn are more or less formed, I continue with equipping other stuff for current tasks (sometimes they are not the same that the items were forged for), assigning armies and moving commanders. Usually I first look at the most important points on the map and analyze who can go where, then give the orders based on that, and then proceed to less important points.
5) Forging.
6) Search spells for unemployed mages.
7) Research for all others.
8) Recruiting.
9) Here I press F1 and scroll all the list looking for 'defend' order. Each case has to be explained.
10) Finally I adjust research levels.
I rarely write things down, usually I have them in my head, or most of them. The single exclusion here that jumps to my mind is Qwerty game where we had to forge gear for 3-5 SCs a turn and it was really hard to remember what was already done without notes, I just made a list of SCs that had to be equipped, the slots for each were represented by lines, and I crossed that lines when I gave order for corresponding item, also the same I had to do with province numbers and GR/trapeze.