Organization
Man, am I anal. Really. I absolutely love organization and anything to do with it. As far as I’m concerned, the Container Store must be heaven (I’ve never been in one, for fear of breaking the bank, though).
So digital organization is an absolute must for me. For the longest time I’ve been looking for the killer app that would get all of my digital flotsam organized. This is a tall order becaue I have a lot of it: posts to mailing lists, snippets from web sites, manuals, correspondence from co-workers, etc. This gives me several different formats to organize and keep and contain.
Not only that, but there are all the to-dos!!! Stuff that is due on a specific date, stuff that I want to eventually do, stuff that I may want to do, stuff that should have been done yesterday, it goes on and on. So, how do you organize all of that? Better yet, and more importantly, how do you keep all of those to-dos in front of you so that you actually do them?
So far, my answer has been a combination of several applications.
Brain Dump
The first is EagleFiler. I tried all sorts of organizers: Yojimbo, KIT, DevonThink, you name it, I tried it. EagleFiler just absolutely blew them away. There are tons of great features, but the most important to me have been:
- Multiple Libraries I hated that almost all of the other applications restricted you to one library where you dumped absolutely EVERYTHING. Yeah, that is kind of what I want to do, but not really. I want to be able to categorize my brain dumps: one for home, one for work, etc. EagleFiler lets me do this.
- No Database EagleFiler doesn’t store your documents in a database. This has several great advantages. First off, this means that EagleFiler can handle any type of file, whether it recognizes it or not, because it doesn’t have to figure out how to store it. Pulling a file out of a library in the same format you put it in is very important for documents that you might need to share with others. If I am ever on a computer that doesn’t have EagleFiler installed or I for some reason decide not to use it anymore, all my data is still in tact and easily moved to something else.
- Great Developer Before making my final decision, I took a look at the forums for the applications to see what kind of development was happening on them. I didn’t want an app that was stagnant and wouldn’t be updated with bug fixes or new features. What I found was actually quite appalling. The posts from the developers of Yojimbo, at least, seemed to be complete averse to any suggestions for improvement. One post in particular stuck in my mind. A user asked if support for multiple libraries would be added in the future (something I, myself, really wanted to know). The developer’s response was basically, “You shouldn’t use our application that way and, if you are, then you’re doing it wrong.” Are you kidding me? Needless to say, I instantly uninstalled my demo and have never looked back.
EagleFiler has become completely indispensable for me. I do have a catch-all Reference library, but I also have specific use libraries. I have a Recipes library that allows me to categorize my recipes, track which ones we liked (and who liked them), which ones we haven’t tried, where they came from, etc. I also start a new library for each project I work on. I can dump all of the e-mail correspondence, random notes, research, requirements documents, etc. into this one library. Since it is searchable, I can easily find that one e-mail about how this drop-down is supposed to look on the page. Light years better than sifting through everything manually.
I’ve also started a Movies library to track my VHS tapes and DVDs. I tag them according to genre and media. This allows me to quickly see which movies I need to get on DVD. When I’m in the mood for a specific type of movie, I can easily find all of the comedies or horror movies. I can also easily track who borrowed one. I have created my own little template into which I put information from both Amazon and the IMDb. Yes, I know, Delicious Library rocks and how could I not be using it to do all this for me? Well, I’ll tell you: because I couldn’t get the scanning to work. I tried the built-in iSight in my MacBook Pro, and an external first-generation iSight. Neither worked. I think out of about 10 movies, I successfully scanned in one. Basically, that means I’d be paying $40 for a really slick interface. Don’t get me wrong, I do think Delicious Library is slick, and if the barcode scanning had worked, I would have been sorely tempted. But I’m really happy with using EagleFiler.
To-Dos
To-dos were a bit harder to deal with. Now, I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and I did find a lot of good advice there. I like the idea of splitting up your to-do lists. I like the idea of making up action items. Keeping a list of projects just didn’t work for me very well, though. I ended up spending more time keeping that up to date than I did actually doing the action items. Certainly not what Mr. Allen intended.
One thing that really stuck in my mind, basically because it just made so much sense, was to keep date-related things in a calendar. For instance, if you have something due on a particular date, it doesn’t belong on a to-do list, but on a calendar. Makes total sense, right?
Wrong. At least for me. I kept forgetting that I had to-do items on my calendar. Not only that, but I just could not find a good way of keeping my to-do lists. Being a complete geek, I really wanted to use plain text files. My real draw to that was that they are platform-agnostic and I didn’t have to have a special application to work with them. Also, I live in the command-line when I can (GUI eye-candy is just lost on me) and I think that emacs rocks. I even started writing some Lisp commands to help me out.
But, I just couldn’t come up with a good format that I could stick to. I’m also absolutely horrible at regular expressions, so parsing out any type of format is almost impossible for me. Damn. Also, I ended up with some massive text files and kept finding duplicate items. Rearranging items started to become more difficult as the lists got longer. Yes, there is primitive search capability, but it was frustrating to have to scroll through the document with each match. I decided it wasn’t going to work.
I really had my heart set on some solution that would be platform independent and available from home or anywhere else. With that in mind, I turned to some of the online to-do trackers. I briefly looked at several of them, but settled on Remember the Milk. I like the simple interface, fine-grained control over permissions for lists, and all the features. But what really drew me to it, was all the Google integration.
Long ago I drank the Google kool-aid when I got a Gmail invitation and set up an account (remember when you had to have an invitation?). Gmail has been fabulous and it really works for me. I have several filters and labels set up, and keep most of my contact information there.
Naturally, I moved all of my calendar items into Google Calendar when it became available. I have several calendars set up (including one just for my 3-year-old) and I really live by it. I get an e-mail each morning with the day’s events and I run Google Notifier to make sure I get all of my reminders. Nothing made me happier than when Google added notifications for all of your calendars.
Best of all, I was able to add RTM to my Google calendar and voila! I no longer have to worry about adding to-dos to my calendar or not. I can either manage them from RTM or from Gcal. Fabulous!
It gets even better, though. I also have a customized iGoogle page and RTM is front and center. I did have to add a few different widgets to the page so that I could keep to-dos a bit separated, but that actually helps me work better.
The Trick
Even with all of this Web-2.0–y goodness, it is useless if you don’t view it constantly. This is a main tenant of GTD and it is soooooo true. Luckily for me, I not only live in the command-line, but in my web browser as well. In my perennial favorite Firefox, I have a tab group named “Launch Pad”. It opens Gmail, Gcal, RTM, and iGoogle all in separate tabs. This keeps them all constantly in front of me and that means that I use them.
Wrap it up already!
My workflow has evolved over several years, and so have my organizational tactics. I can tell you from experience that you don’t always know right away what is going to stick and what isn’t. What I can tell you is that you must be consistent. Some day, I’ll figure out a consistent tagging/filing scheme. In the meantime I lean heavily on searching.
December 15th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
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