At work, I admit I’m probably not the most organised of people. Truth be told, I’m not overly organised, well, anywhere really. If I had things to do, I’d just remember. I’m one of these annoyingly conscientious people (annoying for me) in that I will remember to do things, and they’ll eat at me if I don’t.
I used to only have a few things to do, so they were easy to remember. As I found myself gradually becoming responsible for more and more things, I was having trouble remembering things. I was already organising my diary using Outlook, so it seemed like a good idea to use it for todos and the like. I also bought a Palm TX PDA to organise things more.
Just lately things have been getting busier, and the number of things I’ve had to do has been growing. Not only that, but many of these things are dependent on each-other, and other things happening first. The more I had to think about, the worse it was getting. I’d find myself waking up at 3am thinking about stuff I had to do. I was constantly chewing over things in my mind when I was at home, and quite frankly it was driving me mad.
So I decided to put more of this information into Outlook and notebooks, but it still wasn’t working. It was all so unstructured and messy. It was also long-winded to do these things, and manage the stuff supposedly managing me! It wasn’t working. Then I had a great idea.
I got myself a spiral bound notepad. It’s little, it’s low tech, and it’s simple. Now all I do is if I have something to do, I write it on the list. Doesn’t matter what it is, even if it’s something simple, it goes on the list. When it’s done, I cross it off. When the page fills up (takes a day or two), I re-write a fresh page with the leftover stuff. The more urgent items go to the top, and I fill it up again.
The amazing thing is, this simple method actually works! I’ve been amazed how little I end up thinking about these things. The little notepad sits on my desk all the time, so when I get back to the office I glance down it and see what needs doing. They’re all little one-liners which reference an email, or a voicemail, or something else. It’s enough to point me back to where I need to be and get on with it. The great thing is that I no longer seem to end up obsessing over doing things when I’m not at work.
As a result, my PDA has largely gone ignored lately. I haven’t synced or charged it in ages. I’ve started taking a laptop with me into meetings running OneNote, which in itself is a wonderful, wonderful tool.
Amazing how powerful a small stack of paper worth pennies can be.
