Organization a la Boris

If you're reading this through planetolin or another feed reader that doesn't show this as bold. This post reads far better if you click through to the actual post. I'm rather annoyed my formatting doesn't show... :-(

So this is post actually comes from people asking what I do to keep organized. People are particularly intrigued by Boris, an apparent nerd who's constantly on his computer, using little notebooks to jot notes. Does he use them to keep organized? What does he write in them? Does he have a record of that time that I... uhmmm... never mind. He has everything on Outlook... are these connected?? Anyhow, these questions and more will soon be answered. Read on fair internet friend.

So here's my slew of organizational tools:

Real-World (physical)
2 moleskine notebooks
moleskine cahier notebook
pad of small paper

In-Between-World (computer)
Outlook
EditPad Lite
Word
Excel
Timesnapper

Fake-World (interwobs)
Netvibes
Stikkit

Aight. So I use a lot of junk. True enough. Now here's what it does.

Let's start with the moleskines. Apart from making me seem incredibly pretentious, these notebooks (yes all three) are constant companions Pocket Notebook 1 is dedicated to school. It lives in my left pocket. It has some of the best notes I've ever written. The reason is that I take shoddy notes over several pages of legal pad and then shrink them down to moleskine size; writing things after you see the big picture in a concise format does wonders. This notebook also holds random thoughts about projects, notes on interview with people, class rules, circuit schematic... if it happened to me and it's related to school, this book wants it. This past semester it has also served as the place that I do my time-tracking (I'll talk about this s'more later). Pocket Notebook 2 is not dedicated. It welcomes everything and anything to it's home in my right pocket . Dreams I remember, emo journal entries, directions to your house, bad drawings, the size of my car's windshield wipers, games of tic-tac-toe. Man this book's messed up (I just flipped through the pages). At the back, it holds my expense tracking (more later). Cahier is evidently moleskine's word for super-thin, flexible, cardboard-covered notebook. It is short term memory. I only end up using about half of it because I tear out pages when they don't allow me to see everything they have on them at a glance. Things here are waiting to be added to lists, schedules, or some more permanent type of storage. This is the notebook that I really don't part with. I remember one time in recent memory that I didn't have it on me. I was quite unhappy. I don't like relying on my memory... My Pad is good for reminders. It is almost always blank and it draws my attention to it strongly when it's sitting on my desk with anything written on it.

Outlook runs my life. Yay outlook calendar! The other cool thing it does is have a great folder called 'awaiting.' When I want a response to an e-mail I cc myself and a rule puts it in the 'awaiting' folder marked as read with a green flag. This lets me see at a glance what e-mails I'm waiting on from the 'for follow up' search folder. EditPad Lite keeps notes on things. It's basically notepad with tabs and less memory hogging. Generally these have something to do with an item on one of my lists... I'm actually starting to phase out EditPad for Stikkit, but I think it's only a partial phase out. Word is used for things that I want to look pretty. Admittedly, this is fairly rare, but sometimes I'll write up ideas from my notebooks here to be kept for posterity. Excel is responsible for both my time and expense tracking. After writing down whenever I spend time productively, I type it up on Sunday during dedicated organization time. I do the same with my expenses and end up with pretty charts and graphs that make my life easy to understand. Or at least specific facets of it... Anyhow, Timesnapper also helps things easy to understand by taking a screenshot every minute. Great for figuring out how much productive time I should be tracking!

Here's where the fun starts in earnest. Netvibes holds all of my lists. There's a school to-do list, a single action list (eg fill out expo form), a multi-action list (eg document olin experiments) and two special lists. One of these, 'waiting for' is passive. This is where you go when you're stopping me from getting something done by not having done something yourself (yet). The other one is the red list. Nothing is n the red list when I go to bed. Things on the red list must be done before I'm done with my day. There are a number of secondary lists that I only check once a week during my dedicated organization time. These are things like 'skillz I want to learn,' 'money I'm owed' and 'books I want to read.' And then there's Stikkit. This neat little web-app has completely taken over the job I had remember the milk doing (SMS reminders) and the job I had del.icio.us doing (tagged, searchable bookmarks). It is also taking a lot of 0f EditPad's job. Stikkit now holds most of the extra stuff about my to-do list items. These are great b/c they're searchable, taggable and online. Sorry EditPad, but you are quickly becoming obsolete...

So. Let's review. All of my notebooks have any information I feel is important shunted onto Netvibes as items on lists, onto Stikkit (or EditPad) as notes, onto Word as something nice or onto Excel to be made pretty. In theory, I should also be using my scanner to get things (including my notebooks) digitized and organizable, but this isn't happening currently.

Wow. That's a long entry. Peace out.