Jan
28
Organized Chaos, Part 2
Filed Under Organization
Part 2
Last time, we watched our hero pursue organizational insight from paper to digital and back to paper before ultimately becoming on of those Mac people. Will he prevail in his struggle against organizational chaos? Will he give up and concentrate on just living life? Continue on to find out!
Handheld Redux
After trading my venerable HP tower for an iBook (on which I am typing this, incidentally), I started wondering how to get all the data from my hip Mac apps into some kind of digital format.
Sensing this (or reading the notes I left around the house), my wife surprised me with a new Palm organizer for Christmas. I was back in the game.
The Palm synced seamlessly with my laptop and I found a a lot of good freeware apps. List keeping was never better. And e-books! I’d forgotten about e-books! And solitaire! These were old friends returning to the tavern.
Again, I don’t know what happened. After a couple of months, I stopped using the Palm. It seemed like too much work. I had finally started to understand that time spent fiddling with a system wasn’t really time spent accomplishing anything. Planning to do something isn’t really the same thing as doing that thing.
I feel the same guilt as with the Axim. The Palm is in a fancy shoebox under the bed. Right on top of the Franklin (Covey) planner. Like I might pick either one up any day now.
Moleskine
By now, it was 2006 and the GTD craze was in full swing. Sites like 43 Folders and Lifehacker created communities for people just like me to gather and discuss organizational preoccupations. I must thank Merlin Mann for making my affliction cool. Well, maybe not so cool, but at least I wasn’t alone anymore.
I flirted with online web applications for tracking lists and projects. But these always felt cumbersome. I also didn’t like the idea of having to be online all the time. Portability is always important, as I do a lot of my best planning in the bathroom.
The Moleskine notebook became a hallmark of these communities. I’d been keeping these simple black notebooks for a couple of years for my journals, but had never considered using one as a planner. A former co-worker and fellow productivity geek showed me how he’d set up his Moleskine. My curiosity was peaked. I’d always been concerned with how you would keep a bound book tidy as a planner. You couldn’t add or remove pages. It wouldn’t scale well. But the point was to just go with it, don’t worry about tidy, worry about doing.
I checked out some of the intricate hacks people had devised around this little notebook and was sold. I could be as crazy as I wanted to be and no one would notice. For ten dollars. I bought a pocket notebook the next day.
My first step was to divide the notebook into sections. A section for lists, a section for projects, a section for notes, a section for To Dos, and so on. Back to my old scheming ways, capturing everything like a GTD ninja.
Exactly six months later, I realized I was out of control. I spent a lot of time looking at my lists, tweaking project plans, making notes…and very little time getting anything accomplished. Further, this was all pointless, personal, pet projects. This was 1999 all over again. But I’d replaced the battered Franklin planner with a hipster cliche.
There is no rehab for this kind of thing. So I just quit.
Sanity
Responsibility finally drove me from the forest. With a baby the grandparents refer to as “extremely active”, a move to a new city, and so on, time is at a premium. And I’d rather be enjoying my free time with my wife and son (and even the dogs, at times) instead of fretting over some pointless project. Sure, I still have pet projects. But only a few and I try to keep them useful. Like keeping our files in order or scanning important papers. It’s all about clarity of thought. If something is worth doing, just do it. Don’t plan on doing it.
I also realize that some kind of system is necessary to maintain this clarity of thought. I don’t want to wake in a panic because I can’t remember what kind of primer is best for Warmachine figures. So here is my system:
- Contacts: Address Book on my laptop. Syncs with my iPod.
- Calendar: Google Calendar. Syncs with iCal on my laptop, which in turn syncs with my iPod.
- Email: Gmail
- To Dos: 3 x 5 notecard in my pocket. Only things I actually plan on doing in the immediate future.
- Passwords: In my wallet. If I lose that, these are the least of my concerns.
- Projects and Lists: A few text files on my laptop, mostly for gifts to buy, books to read, and projects I might want to do someday. As I said, important stuff, like preparing emergency escape bags for my family and tagging all my digital photos.
- Notes: Small notebook in my pocket. So I never miss an idea for a thrilling blog post or really bad short story. Really bad. And really short.
And that’s it. The point was for me to worry about what you need to do, what you really want to do and forget the rest. And then just do what you say you will. All the cumbersome technology and productivity flowcharts in the world can’t really help if you can’t get past that idea.
But then again, it’s time for me to get a new phone. And I hear I can get a Blackberry cheap….
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