09/30 What I'm doing to get organized

So I have made a couple of posts about this goals thing, right? I've had an urge to make sense out of my scurrying and align my goals/objectives/projects/tasks myself. Maybe it's the need for a higher purpose, or to find room in my life for more important pursuits. I am not sure.

But, future self, without further ado here's what younger self has been doing as of late to organize things - I keep an outline using Natara Bonsai. I like it because it uses a PDA (which I carry with me) and the desktop, and keeps the two in synch so I can both update on my PDA but have more functionality on the desktop to edit, export, save, etc.

I used to organize my PDA by date and had a whole calendar breakdown of the year by action item. The problem with that was when I would get behind (and get behind I did, often) I would tend to wind up with this big moving train of projects I had to drag to the next day every day. It didn't work for me very well when things came up that had to go to the top of the stack (and things always come up).

So I have in the last couple of weeks reorganized things a little bit. I now have an outline with the following nodes:

• Goals



How I want to feel, what I need to accomplish in order to feel that way.




• Current tasks



Specific action items I need to complete. I try to keep this at no more than 20 but sometimes things pop on. For instance, I have to renew my car's license tabs, and I need to move forward on getting some contractor estimates so those got inserted at the top of the list. There's also production support stuff for work, but I created a sublist for that so I don't wind up getting mixed up about what's a change and what's a broken-you-gotta-fix-it-now item.

The rules for tasks are:




• Something I can accomplish without any outside intervention


• Something with a due date





After reading a few of the entries at Lifehacker and 37Signals, I am trying to keep every task in the form:

Verb the noun with the action by date.

I manage the due date using Bonsai and its interlink capability with Outlook. This is not always perfect but it's workable...so far.


• Active projects.

Projects I'm working on right now, that have a definite due date. The idea is that I ONLY work on these projects and not any of the other categories. This is tough, to be honest, but it's also the reason why I started this system in the first place.


• Pending projects.

Projects which are ready to start but are waiting for room on the active list. Again, they're more or less planned in terms of what needs to happen but I am trying to keep them on the back burner so I can focus on the active projects.


• Unplanned projects.

Catch-all; ideas, things I need to do but I have not worked out how to due them yet. I add steps, etc, and then when I feel like they're ready to start I put them into pending.


• Completed projects.

Obviously, completed projects. When I mark something done I drag it into here, and periodically archive the contents into DayNotez.

Some issues I have are:

• Recurring/ongoing stuff.

Every month I try to complete a list of maintenance tasks for the house - give the dogs their heartworm meds, check the water softener, change the furnace filter, etc. It's kind of a PITA to recreate this list every month, but I don't want to create an ongoing node because that will turn into a junk drawer.


• Maintaining focus on active projects and aggressively blocking non-active projects from my attention.

I have a really hard time saying no to requests and not jumping in to help when something goes wrong. That's just me, but it's not a positive trait because then there's other stuff that goes without attention. This is why I have started using this system, but the struggle is still there for me. Also, of course this is the real world and sometimes you have to drop what you're doing to work on something else.