Is 'frictionless' organization actually possible?

[jbsegal]

So, I need to be more organized. This has ALWAYS been the case, as far back as I can remember.

All these years later, I've finally been able to start putting in to words the problem with all the methods I've tried to try to help. (Other than: They don't help.)

They're all too hard to keep, well, organized, and there's NOTHING that works for me as a true universal capture device.

I have a 1st Gen iPhone, and a Nokia E71.
On each, it takes too long to get the phone out, unlock it, find and launch the note-taking app, and actually enter the note.
If I'm _driving_, when half of the things I've forgotten to do come to me, it's impossible.

If I have a voice recorder of some form, I never remember to transcribe it... I've discovered the notes months or years later, having forgotten about them by the time I finally get to a point where I could transcribe them.

My chosen platform is a mac, my work desktop is windows, my work is done on Linux. I drive my web-browsers hard enough that it can be slow to pull up (website of the day) to get something entered... and I'm not always carrying a machine with me. Go back to the problem with my phones.

If I write it down longhand - which I actually prefer for quick note taking, as trying I've let to find something that smoothly (and on all platforms) lets me put a blob of text here, another one there, and a 3rd alongside the 1st 2, easily.

I did a major diagramming project at my last job in dot (graphviz) because I knew if I got involved in laying out where the arrows and boxes went, I'd NEVER get data in to them.

If I don't get a note taken down quickly, it won't get taken down, and as I read someplace today, "If it's not written down, it doesn't exist."

Of course, once too much of it is written down, there's too much to deal with.

And how the FUCK do you pick out your 'next actions', anyway? (Ref: David Allen, Getting Things Done)

Being organized is not simply 'hard', it's pretty fucking near 'impossible', and this is getting to me.

How do you do it?

(Classic example: I was trying for a while to do a daily wrap-up and pre-org the next day's tasks... but it nearly always happened that I was busy at the wrap-up time, or suddenly it would be time to leave - with a deadline at the other end - and I'd have to not do it. Gah.)

Comments

[thespian.livejournal.com]

I've been using Google Calendar, Gmail and Google Docs of late; I can get to them all from my computer, from anyone else's computer, and from my phone. But the big big deal is that I have had to work really hard at getting in the habit, KNOWING it can become a habit if I keep doing it. Over and over and over (calendar and gmail were easier, and are becoming habitual now, while Google Docs keeps slipping on me).

Google Voice will actually transcribe your voicemails for you and put them online for you. So if you get a google voice number and use it for message leaving, it can fix that issue for you...and THEN it will be done for you, and on the site with all the others.

WHile I'm aware of all the blah blah blah about Google data mining and all, and don't need/want to be lectured by the invariable people who'll want to, that's the habit forming by force that's really starting to make a difference for me.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

I've been a process guy for about a dozen years now, and they keep giving me more responsibility and more money, so I must not be that bad at it, so I'll take a stab at this.

Note-taking: I've let to find something that smoothly (and on all platforms) lets me put a blob of text here, another one there, and a 3rd alongside the 1st 2, easily.

Answer: Being a high-tech kind of guy who had a desk next to an OC-192 rack ten years ago, I have the ultimate high-tech solution for this: a pen and a stack of post-its. My preferred pen is a Sensa you can't get anymore that I've had for nine years, that takes fisher space pen refills. If I'm not writing something with it, it's in my shirt pocket. My preferred post-its are whatever I can steal from the receptionist's closet. In a pinch, you can get pens from there as well, but they aren't nearly as nice.

Priorities: how the FUCK do you pick out your 'next actions', anyway?

Answer: Somebody (Merlin Mann?) recently went on a long rant about how there's no such thing as a list of priorities. Something is either a priority, or it isn't, and you can generally only have one of them. What's the most important thing you have to do right now? That's what's next. When that's done, there will be another thing, but forget about that right now. Focus on what's next until it IS done, and then worry about the next thing.

There are monkeys in the wrench: meetings, surprise suspense dates, fires to put out, senior management with hair on fire, whatever - but in every instance, those things will either be the most important thing that needs to be done right now, or they won't. If they aren't, put them on the list and forget about them until they are. Automate as much as you can. Apply preventive measures as much as you can. If your life consists of running from one fire to the next, and you're not an actual hose-carrying firefighter, that's a sign that something is severely broken in your process, and you should address that at some point. ...when it becomes the most important thing.

From someone who lives with a pen-geek..

[severinpgh.livejournal.com]

Which model Sensa (if you know)?

[tcb.livejournal.com]

In addition to what's already been said, I've embraced ToDo lists of late. In particular, I've embraced toodledo.com. There's a great iPhone app, a decent web interface, and a Firefox plugin. One can make a simple few-word Todo item, and then assign it both a priority, an optional due date, and whether it is repeating or not. There's also an option to star the item for extra special important items. For the first few days, all I did was enter data. When I finally looked at the hotlist, I thought "ya, that looks about right." The most useful feature is that the program calculates an "Importance" value from some combination of the due date, the priority, and whether its starred or not, that make it fairly accurate as to what to spend one's energy on now versus say tomorrow or next week.

I find that it doesn't take that long to keep the list updated, and it actually frees up time and mental energy that was being spent on trying to remember all the items.

As for remembering the items while doing other things like driving, or bicycling, the simple answer is to pull over. Taking 90 seconds out of a drive to make sure that you're on top of all the things you need to be on top of isn't that much of a short term impact, that makes you overall more efficient.

[dianala.livejournal.com]

I have a similar prioritizing issue. I have been using software called OmniFocus that has a non-conventional way of organizing your tasks. It is too late at night for me to describe accurately, but essentially you can add "contexts" to your tasks, and/or associate them with a place. It runs on Mac and iphone and it is nice because it can tell you, for instance, based on your current location, which tasks are nearby. So if you have a few free minutes you can figure out what is easiest for you to do.

It dosen't solve your data entry problem of it taking too long to enter, but my backup plan is pencil and paper, or notebook or back of envelope... and I always stick it in the same place until it is entered into the mac or the iphone.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/

Of course, it helps that a dear friend of mine works on this :)
Good luck!

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

You may be interested in trying to work up note taking with a Livescribe pen. And you can use them to take voice memos without any real pen interaction so you can do it quickly while driving.

Another thing to think about is actually scheduling a 15-20 minute period in your work day as an organizational appointment. Stick it on your calendar and then do it at that time. "Hey, I'd like to meet with you, but I've got an appointment at X time, how about X+20?"

I do use the Omnifocus Mac and iPhone apps, and they're pretty good for to-do list applications. I'd also consider Things. Omnifocus is very Getting Things Done oriented.

If you've not yet read Tom Limocelli's Time Management For System Administrators, you may want to, but it sounds like you know most of what's in it, you're just having a hard time with implementation.

You may also find a Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase to be a useful thing to have.

I also have a hard time ensuring that stuff gets recorded, and certainly haven't gotten the perfect system yet. I'm contemplating the Livescribe pen, and the Levenger thing.

[babasyzygy.livejournal.com]

Add my endorsement for the Livescribe pen.

[kjc007.livejournal.com]

I just picked up ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life by Judith Kolberg & Kathleen Nadeau. Haven't actually looked at it yet, though. I'll let you know if it's helpful.

I second Hilary's recommendation over on Facebook for Morgenstern (Organizing From the Inside Out is the one book I've read & enjoyed, but she has others).

Get it Done When You're Depressed by Fast & Preston, also useful.

The things that have helped me:

1. Habits. I used to lose my glasses all the time at the Ranch. I had to force myself to NOT put the damn things down anyplace BUT the little marble shelf or my bag. Every time I started to put them down someplace else, I had to make myself stop & go to the designated place.

It was a pain in the ass to teach myself, but I reaped the reward of NOT losing my damn glasses anymore.

In the same vein, if I'm interested in a book, I write down the title & authors & (if really motivated) the ISBN and stick the paper in my pocket. Yes, this often means I have 20 little pieces of paper in my pocket, but it also means I HAVE the info if I really need it. Since it's a habit, I check my scraps of paper whenever I'm trying to remember a book title.

Supposedly it take 21 days to make a habit that sticks in your brain. If you miss a day, you start again -- 21 continuous days.

2. When I was working at nitpicky jobs, especially ones that made me track what I did during the day, I maintained an open file & made notes.

E.g., 10am, got in, read email, fought with Jason
10:30am, con call with lawyers
11:07, misc
11:30, shit requested by lawyers from call
12ish lunch
1:17pm, fuckin policy discussion; action items in notebook

Then, at the end of the day, these were enough info that I could reconstruct the day & write a brief report, along with figure out what I need to do the next day.

If I couldn't do it at the end of the day, I could usually figure it out from my notes in the morning. But don't leave it too long or your notes won't make sense.

3. Notebook. I used to carry a spiral-bound legal pad to every meeting. It was always with me. Before things started, I'd go to a fresh page and put the date up at the top. DATE DATE DATE DATE. Very useful, especially when people ask you "about that meeting back on January 27th" and you can whip it open & see what the hell they're talking about.

I often put the topic of the meeting next to the date. If I had a pile of meetings, I'd sometimes put the time in too. Sometimes I even wrote down who was there, especially if my action items depended on their action items, I'd write down theirs as well as my own.

ALSO, I would use the left margin to tag things with ACTION and draw a box around it. This not only gave me a record of my action items, but also cemented them more firmly in my mind.

When I was running the meeting, and writing down EVERYONE's action items, I'd tag mine with a little "Me" above the box and circle it. That way I could quickly distinguish mine from everyone else's.

You can also use the dated notebook in conjunction with your daily notes to reconstruct days that went by too fast for you to figure out what was happening.

Now that I have a bunch of different things that I do, each gets a different notebook. A green one for Garden Club, a red one for MYP, a black one for my diary & misc work/life stuff, a red one labeled "SICK AND TIRED" for my medical stuff, etc. I've cowed several doctors into submission by whipping out my notebook and reciting the dates when various events happened with my health.

[istemi.livejournal.com]

I've taken one suggestion from "Organizing From the Inside Out" to heart. She describes how kindergartens have station - the painting station, the sand table, the dress-up area, etc. Everything needed for that activity is grouped there.

I have the Drop Zone next to the door. There's a set of hooks and a shoe tray.Next to it is a set of shelves. Top shelf is the mail box, answering machine, pens, and index cards. Next shelf is all my chargers on a power strip, with the most-used ones zip tied so they don't fall out of sight. Underneath is the recycling bin and a basket with all the chargers I'm not using. ( Labeled in a silver sharpie, when it's not obvious what they go to.)

When I come in, coat and keys go on a hook. Purse goes on a hook or on the shelf. Phones immediatey get plugged in, good mail gets dropped in the box, junk mail gets thrown out. My phones are charged and I know where my keys are. It's a good feeling.

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of low-tech. Some of my co-workers use composition notebooks to track their to-do items. I don't actually like keeping the records, so for me it works to take a post-it (the brighter, the better -- hot pink is great for getting things done somehow), spend awhile in the morning figuring out the five things I want to do that day, and taping that to my monitor.

How to figure out the five things? (And why five? It's about what fits on a post-it, and it seems to be the sweet spot for me on an average workday.) Honestly, I don't think I have a formula -- sometimes it's putting out fires, sometimes it's little administrative things that have been building up, sometimes upcoming deadlines make it obvious, and sometimes it's just what I feel more like doing.

I suppose there are tech-organizing people and paper-organizing people, and input from one camp to the other might not be useful, but whatever.

I've never been able to get into GTD, possibly because my cobbled-together made-up methods feel like they're working fine. GTD seems too complicated or too much overhead or something.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

I think part of it is discipline and developing a routine. Do the same thing everyday, make time to sit down with the voice recorder and transcribe it. Even if it's just ten minutes before bed every night, no matter how tired you are, make it a routine. (Like KJC said, make it a habit to do things the same way every time/day, it becomes second nature and things get easier.)

I am a fan of paper calendars and paper todo lists. I carry a small notepad or notebook and take notes as I need to. Right now I'm carrying around a large notebook because there is so much going on with the house that I have to remember, a small notebook would have been filled twice over at this point.

I have my laptop on the desk, I don't take it from room to room, It is not in the main living room, thus there are fewer distractions when I do sit down at it to work. I sit down at the desk and the paper to do list and calendar are sitting next to it. Things are transcribed back and forth as necessary. Having everything right there makes keeping track of stuff easier. I don't have to drag the papers and calendar or laptop around the hosue to get it all together to consolidate info. Have a special place for the computer and a bin or box next to it. Get in the habit of emptying your pockets, paper notes, voice notes into the bin next to the computer when you walk in the door, or are undressing for the night, then it's all in one place and easier when you sit down each night to organize it.

To get other stuff done, like stuff around the house, I have a firm rule, my computer goes off at the same time every night. (or around the same time) Usually an hour to and hour and a half before I go to bed. This doesn't mean there aren't occasions where I have to turn it back on to find out something, but it's goes off and I have that time to do other things. The computer is a major timesink for me. When it's on, I get little else done.

Because I run out of energy easily, and often my todo list is overwhelming, I look at the list throughout the day and try to determine what *needs* to be done *that day* or by a certain time that day, and do those tasks first. If I run out of energy, the ones that didn't get done can be put off until tomorrow. If there is nothing that can be put off until tomorrow, then I just start at the top and work through the list.

I think it's all in making a routine and having the discipline to stick to it. Once you get into that routine, things just begin to flow more easily. Getting into the routine can be a challenge, you have to stick with it until it does become the norm and then you wont even realize you are doing it.

Good Luck.

[dcltdw]

Along the lines of low-tech: I have a carrying-around notebook for work. It is almost always with me. Even if this meeting is not about me, a waste of time, I know I won't get anything out of it -- I bring it, because actually, that meeting is a time for me to re-read my notebook and re-marshall my thoughts, while looking like I'm paying attention to what others are saying. :)

A friend of mine has a stack of index cards and a binder clip. I think part of his routine is that he has a meeting scheduled either in the morning or in the late afternoon on his calendar every day to organize it. It's a meeting with only 1 participant, but since his calendar says he's busy, he can fend off other people trying to interrupt him. The nice thing about index cards is that they're self-correcting: if it's too big a stack to shove into his pocket, then clearly it's time to sift through them.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

Index cards and binder clip hacks can be found by googling "hpda" which stands for hipster pda. Index cards and a printer that will print on them are Awesome. But entirely not frictionless.

[redbird]

Mine is neither frictionless nor exactly integrated. It includes a routine of looking at the calendar on my PDA every Sunday, so I won't forget appointments for that week (which I added after missing a doctor's appointment because I remembered it as being Thursday and it was actually Tuesday). The shopping list is a separate app, but it's generalized: baking soda goes on the same list as "warm pants," and something may sit there for a few hours, a few days, or a year and a half. And if I'm at work and think of something for the evening, I open an email to me-at-home, subject line "to do," put that down, and leave the message open until either the end of the day or it gets as long as I want to deal with. That's usually small things, since I won't enter more than I think I can deal with before the next workday.

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

I could tell you what I do, but your (very clear!) description of what doesn't work for you makes it obvious that what I do wouldn't work for you.

What you said about voice recording leads me to this:

1) Google voice number
2) Call yourself, obvs, don't answer. Leave yourself voicemail
3) Have your GV settings (a) transcribe your voicemails (b) email them to your gmail account

From there you could use everything I presume you already know about gmail to filter, file, or whatnot. There's still some question about how to get things from mail to calendar and the like, but I hypothesize this might get you *some* of the way...

[desiringsubject.livejournal.com]

oops. Put another way: I second Thespian...

[kdavoli.livejournal.com]

Clearly you need a butler, personal assistant, secretary, Pepper Pots.

[findyourfloor.livejournal.com]

For people who struggle with organization, the first and most important thing to do is SIMPLIFY. That means:

1. Get rid of as much stuff as possible.
2. Cut down on your obligations and responsibilities.

The less stuff you have, and the less stuff you have to DO, the easier it will be to stay organized.

Also, having a clear and neat space will help you think more calmly and clearly.

As far as a new note-taking system goes, I think you should first get a birds-eye view of it: where, why, when, and how do you take notes? And what do you need the notes for? Make a big chart. Whiteboard is great for this (you can take a picture to save it), or use a big piece of paper. This is the same principle in 3-D organizing that says we should first identify what stuff we have and how we use it, before buying storage for it.

But if you need a system right now, keep things simple. Buy a brightly-colored paper notebook with an attached pen that you keep with you at all times. Yes, that means bringing it into the bathroom, when you run out for groceries, everywhere. No one has to take notes while they're driving (really.), but you can always jot something down in your notebook when you're stopped at a light, or as soon as you get wherever you're going.

Hope this is helpful.

[sodyera.livejournal.com]

I agree. Or you could just pull over and write on Post-Its, then drive again. The physical act of pulling over will help cement it in your brain.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i've been grooving on omnifocus - i have both the mac and the iphone versions. the mac version has an mail app -> omnifocus conduit, so i can send mail to myself and have it appear in omnifocus (actually, this has recently stopped working for me and i'm not sure wtf is up with that, but i use mail app for little enough that i can manually feed things in there).

a couple of times a day, i make a point of looking at omnifocus on the iphone and looking at what's coming due soon and figuring out if i should be doing it or moving it off as something else becomes more important. i've found this helpful for tracking project work and things that are more prolonged than "this this is broken fix it now".

[dianala.livejournal.com]

I knew you were smart :)

[whuffle.livejournal.com]

I don't have an easy answer and I don't know that one exists, however I can share some of the things I've found that do work for me:

1: I use Mozilla's Thunderbird for my email client at home and at work. I have a couple plug-ins that really make a huge difference. One is an instant messenger program integrated into the email client which is called SamePlace. Another of the really crucial ones for me is the Lightning add-on and it's automatic version updater which gives me calendar & task list features in a sidebar just like MS Outlook. I use Windows at work and a Mac at home and Thuderbird with it's plug-ins works exactly the same on both machines. Keeping the same calendar everywhere synced courtesy of Google's cal program really makes it a whole lot easier to keep myself on top of life.
2: I keep a couple google calendars: one for daycare, one for work, one for family. All of these calendars are set to sync with my calender in my email at work as well as on my home computer and my iPod Touch. That means I can set reminders and alarms and they show up wherever I am. I have a butt simple phone and I use it as nothing more than a phone. Most of the time it stays turned off in my pocket unless I know I'm expecting a call.
3: I set reminder alarms on my calendar for EVERYTHING. Got a dentist appointment? Set a reminder for 2 weeks out, 2 days out, 2 hours out. Am I supposed to bring a dish for a potluck at my kid's daycare? Set a reminder to show up the day before. Got a meeting with a client? Set a reminder a day before, an hour before and 15 minutes before. NEVER TURN OFF A REMINDER until after the event has passed. Yes, you can "hit snooze" just don't turn the damned thing off.
4: Like you, I try to make myself time at the end of each day for doing a wrap up on my day's work and an organizational session for the next day. I have a recurring alarm set on my calendar that goes off an hour before the end of my work day. I try to be disciplined; I'll only allow myself to hit snooze on the alarm once. Even if I'm not done with the task at hand. If I have to, the first thing on my wrap-up/organizational list will be all the notes for what I was working on so I can pick the project back up at the beginning of the next day.
5: At home, I keep a grocery list on the fridge at all times. When cooking if I find that I'm out of something I just jot it down. Then when I want to do my food shopping on the weekend, the list is already partially made up. If you want, Epicurious.com even has an iPhone app that lets you select recipes, and assemble a grocery list so you can do all your meal planning on their app or their website and then take the list shopping with you.
6: Similar to the grocery list, I keep a chores list on the fridge. When I do a chore, I cross it off. When I see something I want to get done, either do it right away or go through the kitchen and add it to the list.
7: Have a regular roster of the things that MUST get done integrated into your daily routine. For me, I know that every other day I have to wash a load of diaper laundry. It's become habit to come home, take the laundry downstairs, get it started, then start making dinner. When the washer buzzes, I take a break from cooking to go down and toss everything into the dryer. Similarly, when I've got a pot on the stove and need to wait for it to finish cooking, I'll wash a couple of the dishes sitting dirty in the sink, or I'll empty the dishwasher and start re-loading it.
8: Have a designated place where the mail goes right near the front door. Make sure everyone has a mailbox and there's a recycle bin and a shredder sitting right next to it. Shred, recycle, and put each person's mail in the box when you come inside every day. It really does only take about 2 minutes. When it comes time to pay the bills, you just grab the handful of stuff in your mailbox and sit down at the computer. Or, switch to paperless billing, get all your statements via email, and just set yourself a recurring calendar alarm to remind you to sit down and pay each of the bills at the right time of the month.

Hope that some of that stuff helps. It's a lot of what's keeping my head afloat when juggling life with a toddler and a full time job.

[fenicedautun.livejournal.com]

I was going to comment on the end of the day wrap-up/to-do list and figured I'd piggy back this comment. I actually worked out that the end of the day just didn't work for me. I was always running to finish 6 things, I often had 4pm, 5pm, and 6pm meetings (only time other people didn't have meetings), and get out the door to my evening plans. I did it in the morning instead. My workday could not begin until I reviewed my to-do list and updated with anything that had come in by e-mail. If I had an early meeting, I did that, and then sat at my desk and did my to-dos. That generally also helped me with launching into my project of the day.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

I have exactly this problem. I went from maybe 5% to 50% by adopting a paper weekly planner (Moleskine, just small enough to barely fit in a pants pocket, but I usually carry it in my bag). What's keeping 50% from becoming 100% is that I do need to keep tasks in electronic format, and right now I have way too many places to have to keep looking:

- general gmail + gtasks + gcal
- work gmail + gtasks + gcal
- domestic gmail + gtasks
- work Oracle calendar
- work talks calendar
- RT
- JIRA
- Rally (which thankfully will be shot in the head because the license is stupid expensive, so we're only buying one seat and the project manager will wrangle it for us)

so the best I can do right now is some meta-organization, scheduling time to patrol each of the input sources. On my Invisible Task List is the task "write a Berkeley Mail-like command-line tool to iterate through tasks drawn from all sources, one at a time in a reasonable order", because staring at a long list of tasks seriously destroys my gtd.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

You don't need a new organizer; you need sleep.

You have untreated sleep apnea. It will continue to be difficult for you to remember what the hell you're supposed to be doing UNTIL YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT.

I'd encourage you to work with a sleep doc to find a mask that works for you -- or even shave, if you have to -- and to find a machine that works for you (and doesn't cause respiratory infections).

I think until you're actually SLEEPING, we won't even know if you have ADD, since anybody who's dramatically underslept looks like they have ADD.

[kimberlogic.livejournal.com]

yes, this.

[c1.livejournal.com]

I'm using a combination of approaches:
iCal for scheduling things-- integrates with Mail, which means that if someone says "hey, let's meet on Monday", I can hover over, and then click "Monday" and it automatically goes to iCal. Priceless.
To compliment that, I have a half-size 3-ring binder (get them at Staples) which is my Getting Things Done organizer. I've printed out the relevant calendar pages and punched them, then inserted them into the binder. Unfortunately, I can't find a program that prints iCal calendars for 8 1/2 x 5 1/2, so I have to fold them in half and open them gatefold style, but that's a minor irritant.
I keep a Moleskine with me for random quick notes.
And I've started using Omni Focus for project management tasks. Integrates well with GTD.

The most important part of my planning regime is that part where I've reminded myself that I'm not going to be perfect at it, to schedule accordingly, and to keep a calm attitude when things don't go according to plan-- to set things up so they can fail gracefully.

[kimberlogic.livejournal.com]

As you know, I'm a big fan of both note-taking and Omnifocus. If Omnifocus had sharing available, I could help you with all this in a way that we both might find a bit easier. That said, I'll spend some time today tinkering with context in it to see if there are some temporary solutions.

As to how to identify next-actions, you need to get used to seeing the overview, the big picture of tasks and finding what are (to you) the logical actions within the goal/project. Some of these will be easy - can't do task B til you've done thing A or deadline-based. Some won't. Practice will surely help you get used to breaking things into manageable tasks.

And as I've long said, I think you need to make a serious committment to self care. Eating well, exercising or walking every day, going to bed so that you can have better rest (if not better sleep), using your CPAP. I can continue to try to help you do these things, make them easier, etc. but until you see them as important to your own wellbeing and worthy of effort & priority, things won't change much.

Since you asked...

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

Couldn't really add much to what everyone else has said (wow!) but FWIW, I have a sticky note app (Mac) that I use for my running todo list. It's completely free-form and lets me plan things in any way I like. The only problem is that it's not online and so I need to be at my laptop and my laptop only. But it's worked for me for several years now.

Also? when you make todo lists, WRITE/TYPE EVERYTHING DOWN AND DO IT ALL IN THE SAME PLACE. I cannot stress this enough. If you only have one place to refer to when you aren't sure what to do next, then you'll save yourself a helluvalot of time, rather than running around, checking calendar this and schedule that. And don't ever try to trust your memory or hold stuff in your head. Therein lies Madness.

And I second the idea that you might want to try to get a decent amount of sleep regularly. Maybe that should be your first task: find out how much sleep you need and get it. If you are depending on an alarm clock to wake you up every morning, then you aren't getting enough sleep.

You might want to ping roozle about this sort of stuff; she's already got amazing superpowers along these lines and IIRC, she's working on improving them even more.

[lioritgioret.livejournal.com]

Hey, I would just like to applaud you for continuing to work on the organization issue.
I do find that giving things their very own time and space is helpful -- and/or that lacking that control/freedom/discipline makes organization way harder. People who are smug about organization say they make that daily planning time solidly inviolable -- but I think for folks like us that may mean putting it in the middle of the day, or doing it when we get home, rather than first thing in the morning or just before you leave work for the day, both of which tend not to be the easiest hunks of time to wall off.
But what do I know? I am currently not making it out of the house every day. Which is what happens when you have no organization at all. . .;-)

[lioritgioret.livejournal.com]

Although I'm really enjoying riffing on the Lifescribe pen, I'm having terrible problems with organization for a couple of reasons. The big one is that I am so far behind on some big projects that can't be jettisoned and can't well be passed off.
I gotta just DO them. But it seems like everything else is planes stacked up over Newark; when one of them contacts the tower because it's about out of fuel and ready to crash, I have to land it, and then I have trouble getting back to the overall tower renovations. Sometimes the answer is cutting back on extranea for a while. Sometimes I cut back all the extranea and get too depressed to do anything. It's a fucking crap shoot.
I find a big one for me is having an appropriate environment for doing that kind of work. It's asking a lot for a person to be thoughtful and in planning mode in the same cube where you have to be responsive and hyper. In addition to making it an "appointment" with yourself for organizing, I wonder if you could book a conference room for 15 minutes at the end of each day (or at lunchtime or something) so you have to get up and go somewhere to do your thinky-thing, where you are *not* on call and can close a door. (I don't know, maybe you have an office already, but I don't think I've *seen* an office in the Boston metro area since about 2001.) The better-organized folks at my last job routinely booked conference rooms to do long-term planning work in.
I wonder if you would benefit from the advice for creative people on nurturing their art -- I'm thinking about things like "The Artist's Way", which is quite a bit about how to make your creative work your priority by giving it time, space, and value in your thinking. That approach can work for other things you want to add to your life -- the nutritionist whose book I ghosted over the summer was big on making the same kind of commitment to exercise, she suggested thinking of it as an appointment with the President ("you wouldn't cancel that for anything, would you?") and maybe organization would benefit from the same thing.
I don't know if you have this thing -- you seem pretty strong-spined to me -- but it also gets important for me not to absorb the panic and priorities of others. Just because a colleague is freaked out does not mean I have to derail my whole day. But I usually do.
And, alas, a nifty new pen won't solve that.
Someone below wrote about habits, and I would second all of that. Habits are so useful. A lot of organization (or exercise, or creativity) is only hard to get set up; if over time it can become automatic default, you start to reap the benefits. It takes a while before the structure stops seeming phony and restrictive and starts to give you freedom, but it does.
I think a lot in this context about the number of tries it took, over about two years, before I quit smoking. To the best of my recollection I have not had a cigarette in over 22 years. But I stopped and started again several times, including, argh, three times within two weeks in the final month.
I've been thinking about all of this a lot because having Scliff moved in torpedoed all my good habits, and I'm struggling to reinstitute them in the new context, and not sure at all that it's possible. So I would also cut you a lot of slack for trying to manage this in a world full of other people; you are so social that there are complications here I couldn't even deal with thinking about for very long!;-)

[istemi.livejournal.com]

What results do you want from being more organized? Organizing is a means to an end. ( Ok, for some of us it's a fetish, too. Mmmmmm, organization.) It's not a natural behavior.

Fill in the blank: "I hate it when _________ . If I were more organized this wouldn't happen because __________."

You mentioned a lot about capturing and retrieving notes. Are you forgetting brilliant ideas? Forgetting what's on the grocery list? Missing commitments? Got a nagging feeling you're supposed to be doing today?

I think about "putting the bucket under the drip". I know what I'm going to space on, and I figure out how to slide the remedy into place. I never had cloth shopping bags with me when I shopped. Now the bags live in the car. When I empty them I toss them on next to the kitchen door, and that's enough to make me bring them back next time I go to the car.