It may seem weird, but I find myself needing good organization more now as a stay-at-home mom than I did when I was employed.
Until recently, I felt I could mostly keep it all together in my head. The child-less will scoff, but I feel like there’s just more in there now, and it’s finally getting harder to keep it all straight.
I’ve always known that organization would make me more efficient, more effective, and I’ve tinkered around with various to-do list organization and format over the years but nothing has stuck.
I’m always trying out some new variation – post-it notes, big notebooks, little notebooks, electronic – in a New Effort to Get My S*** Together. It’s probably partly just because I’ve always loved making lists. I just never seem very good about using them.
The latest incarnation, though, is actually showing some promise. Shortly after I got my Droid, I began using Google Tasks, which syncs between my phone and laptop.
I sit down at the laptop to do any serious business or leisure and I always have my phone with me, so the list is always right at my fingertips. Plus the Great Google just integrated Tasks with Gmail, so it’s even more visible and accessible (it also ties in to Google Calendar, which I’m using in conjunction with Tasks for actual appointments and events).
The modern person’s responsibilities are just too extensive and complex to maintain just one list, of course – it would be massive and unmanageable. But, like most people I imagine, I have always struggled with how to organize those lists so that I get everything done when I need to.
Currently, I am using a system of multiple task lists. It’s easy to switch between lists, add things, move them to another list and check them off. You can even put due dates on them that will show up on the calendar.
My main list is called Anxiety – a holdover from a Mac app I used for a while. It’s all those top-of-mind things that crop up that you have to take care of right away. For a while I had another list dated for the current week, but really with the amount I seem to be able to get done in a day, all of those things are really Anxiety material.
So then I have a list for the following week, and sometimes for the week after that if I’m ramping up towards something, that gets filled with all those things that I need to get to but that can hold off a few days.
Inevitably, new Anxiety items crop up so I may not get to everything I planned for that week, so at least once a day or so, I reassess what goes where. Turns out, it’s actually useful to spend a couple minutes thinking about prioritizing what you’re doing rather than just operating under the gun all the time.
Then there’s another list called The Big To Do, which contains all those things that should be taken care of in an ideal world but seem to be able to slide in day-to-day craziness – cleaning out the shed, organizing the photos, writing your cousin in Pennsylvania.
I guess I have that list hoping that all this organization one day provides some time to actually use it. In the meantime, I hope I’m not missing anything I put on there optimistically thinking I’d get to it sooner (just added Review the Big To Do to my list for next week).
Finally, I create ad hoc lists on the fly for any specific needs that arise – Packing list for Montana, Thank you notes I need to write, that sort of thing. It’s so easy to create a new list and then just delete it when you no longer need it that it would be silly to drag out another system now.
We’ll see if this one actually sticks or fades away like another resolution, but it’s been testing well so far!
(Though I admit I’ll still pull out a pen and paper for those list-lover classics like Life Goals and Places I’d Like to Visit.)