What Can Someone Do to Get Organized Around Here?

Question

For years I have been trying to find an organizational scheme which works for me.

I've tried digital calendars (Google Calendar, My WebCal at work, Chandler, Sunbird) to no avail as of yet. I've played around with Remember the Milk (which is a pretty cool app in and of itself...) but I never quite got in the groove of actually using it and checking it. I've even done the _**physical**_ calendar thing (the horror). Maybe the best scheme I've found (which during the summer has gone to rot) is a wall of color-coded sticky notes... organized colorful chaos if you will. Oh I do get things done (appointments, projects, etc.)... but it would be nice to actually have things layed out in a cleaner fashion. Then I wouldn't have to worry so much about if I've forgotten something.

The Question:

• How do people organize their life, their work, their software projects? Do you use software, some physical scheme, or what? Are people actually organized?

I guess the tie-in to software development is: I think I'd have more brain cycles available to get things coded if I had to spend less keeping everything else in order. I do think this is as, or even more important than, having a good monitor, keyboard, and chair. So what say you the people?

Answer 1

I think the problem may be that you are focusing on tools (calendars, lists) instead of processes (GTD). That being said, I'd start with GTD, a simple and popular process.

Like anything, you can totally go overboard with GTD, and it can be completely overwhelming if you try sifting through all the GTD noise out there. I'd start simple and just read the book.

Answer 2

Lifehacker.com and 43folders.com helped me out a lot, you can find a lot of articles about productivity, organization, etc.

The simplest and cheapest way to get organised fast, I think is the Hipster PDA.

My organisational scheme is:

• Google Calendar for scheduling (it's very hard to get started with scheduling, it gets better later on)
• Remember The Milk (with a touch of GTD) for to-do [remember the GMail Firefox plugin and iGoogle gadget]
• Google Notebook (I'm thinking of switching to Evernote) for information aggregation

My advice to you would be:

Keep your inbox empty, don't stress yourself about becoming organised, find your own routine and stick to it.

Edit: If you keep forgetting stuff all the time - Google Calendar and Remember The Milk have awesome reminders. They can text you, send you emails, IMs etc. If you're the kind of person that likes to be 'bugged' all the time then use those features. I for one can't stand the overload of automatic messages, I'm better off checking everything myself and setting the reminders for really important stuff

Edit 2: Some answers here might be relevant

Answer 3

Remember The milk is most useful to be since I've enabled it on gmail in Firefox. It replaces the ads (I think you have to have greasemonkey installed as well). It's beautiful, and I'm in my e-mail almost all the time anyway.

Answer 4

fogbugz. It's free (kind of... Joel might take issue with that...)

Oh, and I have little 5x8 (or something) spiral bound flip pads that I label the covers with sharpies. One for SCRUMS, one for 1x1 meetings, one labeled meetings.rand()

I kind of use Outlook now and then too...

Answer 5

I use gCal for scheduled events, but I use a (gasp) paper notebook to keep track of tasks. I find electronic to-do lists too distracting: I spend more time tweaking the list than actually getting things done. Paper eliminates this distraction. I try to review the list regularly and kick some old things (toward the front) off the list when I can.

The two biggest keys (one from GTD) I've found are:

1. Get everything out of your head and on paper.
2. Clear at least one lingering task everyday. That "psychic weight" (Hanselman's term) gets in the way of getting other things done, IMHO.

Answer 6

Hi

I use a combination of a support ticket system and a notepad and pen (the paper variety of notepad that is). The ticket system is used by the team to manage ongoing issues and the notepad is used during round table sessions to note down minor issues. Each issue is numbered and when done gets a big tick. It is very satisfying to have a couple of pages of notes in the morning and have most if not all of them ticked in the evening. Gives an immediate feedback that the day has been a good one.

As for say Outlook Tasks, well I don't use it. It in some way feels less real to put them in there and is to easy to ignore. Also when I am talking to people writing it down means I can still converse with them without having a screen getting in the way.

As for priority well it does feature in what we do but sometimes you have a bunch of stuff of equal priority. The way I do it is to skim through the list and do the easy stuff first and then again do the less easy and then the tricky. In this way I can remove a lot of the baggage from my list which in a way helps to free my mind which then helps me with the more involved issues. It also helps as a kind of warm up routine to get you into the zone to do the easy first as you get warmed up the difficult becomes less so.

Answer 7

I have a small A4 sized whiteboard right next to me. THis holds all my current life situations and occasionally a scribble when I'm trying to debug a program.

As for software development I've always been a fan of todo lists. They order me and allow me to prioritise. I've since moved on to more concrete soloutions than a text file (Task Managers in my IDE, ticket systems etc.) but the good old checklist is my personal soloution everytime.

Answer 8

Get a (low-tech, honest to goodness) sticky note pad and write down your tasks.

I think the biggest mistake people make in terms of trying to be organized is that they make it too complicated. Don't spend more time trying to get organized than you do actually doing the work.

Answer 9

I use google calendar sync + Exchange + Exchange-to-phone-via-bluetooth.

They are all two-way and that way I can always write on either my phone, my outlook or just in my browser. That really made a difference for me!

Answer 10

I've tried about every online and software to-do list system known to man. But I keep going back to a pen and paper.

At work we use Fogbugz to track bugs and also IT department help desk stuff. What's not organized there I keep track of in my trusty notebook. The way in which I use my notebook is pretty closely described by the Getting Sh-t Done method.. which you can read about here.

As for electronic bits and pieces I'm a big fan of Evernote. I track code snippets, links, and pretty much any other reference item I come across with it. The application is nice, the web interface is nice, and the windows mobile app is great for looking stuff up on the go.

Answer 11

@Prakash - a tool very similar to the sticky note app you linked is StickIt. I think it's very good.

Answer 12

I use plaintext files.

Though I'm in need of some good totally transparent syncronization / backup over the internet

Answer 13

Rands in Repose has two excellent posts on how he manages his daily life. Read both The Taste of the Day and the follow-up The Trickle List. Very recommended read.

I realized that I've been doing pretty much the Taste of the Day-thingy for my own personal long-term project.

Answer 14

I have found that emacs with planner-mode to be mana from heaven. It sits on top of muse-mode, which is a wiki mode for emacs. Everything is in plain text format, its easy to work with, and it links in with a bunch of other emacs packages.

Everything inside of planner-mode is plain text, so its extremely versatile. Additionally, you can make wiki-links to all of your current projects files. Hierarchical projects are as easy as linking one project file to another. It works well with the GTD style of keeping organized (and probably others). Because your organization system is inside of your IDE, everything is linked together, and at hand.

I can be knee-deep in code, get interrupted with a task, and quickly hammer in "Alt-x planner-create-task some info about the interruption" and get back to what I was doing. Additionally, you can rapidly make annotations to various files quite easily with remember-mode.

Of course, this really only works well if your comfortable inside of emacs, but there might be something similar for your editor/IDE of choice.

Answer 15

I've found WikiPad to be very useful. There are a bunch of GTD-style enhancements to it, which look fairly complex but boil down to some basic formatting eg "todo.High: pay taxes". WikiPad can collect all of these entries from a bunch of wiki pages and present them in one place.

Answer 16

"Zen to Done" off of Zen Habits distills some of GTD and makes the techniques a little less daunting to learn.

Getting things out of my head and on to paper helps a lot. That way I'm not needing to remember it anymore.

Answer 17

This week I read about Tiddlywiki. It is a single-html wiki, which can be modified with a normal webbrowser. You can keep it on your usb-stick, or upload it online. There are variations, themes, plugins, ... I am currently playing with d-cubed, which includes a GTD system too. It looks very promising to me, but haven't much practical experience yet.

Answer 18

I got myself a Nokia N810 this year and I'm using the Pimlico Suite on it (especially "Dates" and "Tasks") to organize myself. Both a pretty simple and don't have many features (just the right amount), which I appreciate. The tools are also available for other PDAs or PC (only GTK needed I think).

I have also organized my mailbox GMail style - I create a folder "Archive" and everything that's not really important at the moment is moved there. This way I always have at most 0-10 mails in the inbox, which need me to do something. When they "outdate" (work is done, mail is answered or whatever), they go to the archive too. This really improved the way I'm working.

Answer 19

I'm 5 months late to this party, but I've been thinking about this a bunch, and while I still haven't decided on the right tools, alas, I think it can be broken into three main pieces:

1. Long term memory: Some kind of web-based tracking app where you and your group can keep track of what the priorities are (fogbugz? rally? bugzilla??)

2. Discussion: Some kind of web-based discussion tool where you and your group can bat around ideas. I'm still trying to find the right app for this. Basecamp works ok, except for the part where it changes the things you write.

3. Short term memory: Some kind of scribble area for yourself. Notepads, stickies, whiteboards... I'm a whiteboard user myself, but it hardly matters.

Ideally #1 and #2 would be handled by the same app, so you could tie it all together, but I have yet to find it.

Of course, I'm talking about group organization here, not personal. For personal organization I really only care about one app: google calendar. Where is my body going to be, and at what time? Everything else (email, notes, lists, scribbles) is noise. Life-enriching noise, perhaps, but noise just the same.