Time, Task, Life Management
My journey to get organized.
There are many, many ways to organize the project and tasks in your life. Every individual can find a different way to do this and find that one works better than another for THEM. I know that I have been through several tools to try to organize myself and keep my todo's and projects managed. A tool can only help organize, it won't get the things done. That is the most difficult part of the process for me.
My First Try, a paper based system
I realized a bunch of years (for the chronologically gifted, that is a meaningfull number ;-) that I was extremely disorganized. I had a ton of ideas, experiments, proof of concepts and real projects. I also had personal tasks to get done (renew car license, pickup milk, buy water softener salt, etc). I started using a paper system that was mainly a time management and secondarily an information management system. Each day had a page where you kept your daily notes on anything you needed to do or anything you did. Each evening you spent time copying information from the daily pages to contextual pages. These were contacts, projects, and other categories.I believe the system was called the TMS (time management system). Clever name.
It took a lot of time to move entries. The note book was 0n 8 1/2 x 11 pages and too big. I used this for about a year before I abandoned it.
Did I mention that I believe I am ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). This adds to my issues around organization.
Second Try, Microsoft Outlook
Our corporation used Exchange and Outlook for email. This has a elementary task management tool within the client. It gives you a place to collect ALL the items that you need to do. They have a the ability to categorize entries. These categories can be for prioritization and context. Similar to tagging this gives you a way to gather all the pieces within a specific context.Reminders, due dates and other meta-data can be associated with a task. This is all great and can give you a great place to get it all together.
What I found was the inability to work my corporate, personal and side business tasks together. Access was a problem as was the dilemma of using corporate resources for doing personal stuff. The system itself worked ok but I needed something that was going to be network based. Heck even then, the internet was becoming an important tool.
Next I'll talk about some of the new tools I've found and used.
