If there’s a to-do app out there, I’ve probably got it.

It’s not that I’m disloyal to any one of them (well, okay, I am), but after using something for a while, I get that whole malaise thing going on.  I either a) don’t check it like I should, and end up missing things, or b) get too hyperspecific in my adding of things, so maintaining the blasted thing becomes a to-do-list-item in and of itself.  It kind of defeats the purpose of that whole increasing productivity bit.

A lot of what I’m doing right now is hyperspecific.  Or at least, it’s project-specific.  And for those kinds of things, these apps seem to work pretty well.  Put in a line item, check it off, celebrate with pie.  Easy peasy.  For those, I’m fine with app-as-project-management.

When it comes to life stuff, though — the everyday, do this, do that, do it again tomorrow — that’s where a lot of these app-type things fail.  Either you have to check them all the time, set a bunch of alerts for stuff, or schedule your day around your stuff to do.  (Which never works for me.  My work stuff might take me an hour today, but three hours tomorrow, and god only knows when those three hours will be.)  Plus, a lot of it’s stuff I don’t particularly want to do, which means relying on an app or system to just tell me again that it’s time to do something is kind of futile, because I’ll be resisting like a mofo.

Enter: The Simplest Game, Ever.

I have a long list of repeating tasks that should be done daily-ish to stay on top of them.  Stuff for work, stuff for the web, stuff for the house, stuff for me.  Stuff that isn’t necessarily attached with a goal, per se, but is regular ol’ maintenance work, but without the coverall glamour.

After noticing yet again that I put off answering email (which I totally do, sometimes even thinking I answered it with my mind already, apparently), and that the dishes were piling up, and holy crap I think a mushroom is growing out of the dust on the television set, and resenting every single second of it all, I came to a place of realization:

Something was gonna have to change.  And since the dust will still collect and the email still won’t be answered by my mind, I had to change my attitude.  And the easiest way to do that…turn it into a game.

First, assemble all your neverending, mundane tasks.

(Mine aren’t all things like dusting, btw, despite the card up there in the picture.)

Make sure to get all the stuff you like to do, stuff that babysteps your butt toward a goal, and stuff you hate every day, but know you should do.  Flossing, for instance.  Or folding the laundry.  Or responding to comments, or updating your files, or checking the dog (or the kids) for ticks.  Whatever it is you want to do/you know you should do.

Grab some index cards, cut them in half (or not), and write one thing on each card.

Here’s where it gets fun.

Assign each thing a point number.  I did mine by giving everything an automatic point.  (After all, it wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t worth doing.)  For everything that was urgent, I gave it an extra point.  For everything that was important, I gave it an extra point.

That means that for things that were urgent (needing immediate attention, but were kind of mundane), it was a two-point card.  For things that were important (such as updating a website, or writing something that advanced another goal), it was also a two-point card.  For things lucky enough to be both urgent and important (such as writing an article for pay with a deadline), they’re three points a pop.

In addition, I added a few special cards.

Since there are some things I procrastinate on more than others, I gave some special incentive.  I also added in some wild cards to spice things up.  Such as:

• Two five-point wild cards: one for a certain amount of time on a big huge job, and one for a task of my choice.
• An either/or card: several, that give two choices.  Do this OR that for a point.  Do both for two points.  For really small jobs that often get overlooked as annoyances.
• A “per item” card:  For email and other often-put-off tasks, as extra mojo, I made a “one point per item” card.  When it comes up, I give myself fifteen minutes to do as many of those items as I can, and count a point apiece for the items.  You can rack up points this way and get over the procrastination hump without even trying.

Then you just go play.

The way I do it is to do whatever it is that I’m doing (writing, reading whatever, researching something online, or just general messing-about) for a set period, or with criteria.  Like, if I’m watching a movie, after each scene, I get to pause and pick a card.  If I’m writing, every 27 minutes, I pick a card.  If I’m being particularly nerdy and playing WoW, I draw a card after every quest.  (Hey.  I told you I was a nerd.)

I’m tallying all my points on scrap paper.  So far, I’m averaging about 70 points a day on the weekends.  More on weekdays.  Considering most things are worth two points, that’s a lot I’m doing every day, instead of sitting around and thinking that it’d be a really good idea to fold that damned laundry already.

Sometimes, all it takes is a trick to get your body moving in the right direction.

For me, that means imaginary points that don’t do anything other than use up scrap paper.  (At some point, though, I’d love to assign the points a dollar value, and use that as reward money.  Maybe 100 points = $1?  No idea.  But it’d be incentive, for sure.)

How do you keep motivated on the little things?

Y’know how sometimes, you’re just bopping along, doing your thing, and suddenly, the thing becomes A Thing?

Maybe it’s just me.

Either way, right around the beginning of the year, after I decided that Adventure was going to be my word of the year, I was joking with my (equally nerdy) friends about starting the Nerd Adventure League and Blanket Fort Society.  Its purpose would be to promote adventuring and to watch numerous Dr. Who episodes from the comfort of a blanket fort.

Just to keep my regular, non-nerd, non-adventurer friends from being force-fed adventure spam, I set up a facebook group for it.

And apparently, a hundred people or so thought it should be A Thing.

We’ve been invited to a convention in Florida to set up a blanket fort, for instance.  And a paper in Anchorage, Alaska’s mentioning the Year of Adventure in a story this week.  That kind of A Thing.

There’s not really a webpage for it, in specific, so I think I’m going to just pop any static stuff here from now on.  (We’re doing a Campcrafting badge program thingie that might need a place, for example.)  I’ll try to keep the Nerdy Adventure posts to their own section, in case you’re not a nerdy adventurer.

If you are, though, feel free to join us.  All adventurers welcomed.

(Now that it’s A Thing and all.)

What Fear Can Teach Us

Instead of going the whole New Year’s Resolution route this year, I took a page from Leonie Dawson’s amazing life planner and made a list of a hundred things I wanted to do this year.  It’s not really goals, per se, but a list of things that, by the end of 2013, would be really cool to have done.  I did it last year, and again on a minor scale for both Summer and Autumn with the bucket lists, and I have to say:  it works better than most lists of stodgy “goals”, which seem, at least in my own head, to equate to actionables and a long to-do list that I’m much more likely to avoid with the strategic application of cookies than actually to do.

(Hey, I never said I was perfect.  Far from it, actually.)

One of the things on that list of 102 (I’m an overachiever) was to watch 20 really good TED talks.  I always seem to forget TED’s there, as this really great resource by people with really big brains, willing to share.  Inevitably, every time I watch a few of these things, I feel my horizons expanding, and I get a zillion and one new ideas from the new perspectives, and in 2013, I’m looking for some great big horizons.

Today’s random talk is the one linked above, by Karen Thompson Walker, and as talks go, it’s not all that exciting on the surface.  Walker’s a writer, and it shows in her delivery, but the story she tells is one that stuck with me:  that fear is a kind of divination, and that it’s an innate storytelling ability in all humans that makes Fear possible.  The key, she says, is to look at them as a reader would, of any other kind of story — with a dual mind, Artist/passion and Scientist/analytical.  Choosing which story to believe, then, turns Fear from this overwhelming, huge, very real to your brain kind of thing…into just what it is:  a story.

As someone who often lets her fears get really big, really scary, and really overwhelming, this was like a giant clue-by-four straight to my head.  Fears do occasionally come true.  But it’s rarely the most salacious of them that’s the real threat — it’s the small ones, the ones we don’t think about.  The fear of a heart attack after too many of those Avoidance Cookies, or of muscle loss from sitting here inactive.  And that it’s up to us to decide which fears are actually the ones that will come true.  We just have to read the right stories.

Go watch the talk, folks.   See if it doesn’t change your perceptions just a little bit today.

Happy 2013.

Sleeping aside, I’ve been doing a lot of taking inventory from this past year.

Looking at what worked, what didn’t, why things did or didn’t, that kind of thing.  It’s all part of coming up with the new Plan for 2013, et. al..

Not that A Plan ever really stays..a plan, mind you. New opportunities, unforseen events.  You know the drill.  But it’s nice to have one even if it’s most definitely written in pencil.

This past year, one of the things I did was to actually keep track of the books I read, which I usually don’t do.  I read in spates, much like everything else I do, and I forget where my lists are from one spate to the next sometimes.  I kept this one in my journals, though, and surprisingly, I read something like 57 books over the past year.  (Probably more, because of aforementioned forgetting to write things down.)

Now that I’m a confirmed Kindle addict, I find I’m reading a lot of entertaining crap, with a few more serious things tossed in here and there.  A few life-changers.  Mostly the equivalent of fast food, vs. some organic soul-nourishing type stuff.  :)

So question for you:

Got any good book recommendations for me?

I’m mostly reading fiction, for the record.  I get enough non-fiction in my day to day life.  I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, though I’ve been reading a lot of Corey Doctorow’s stuff lately (so technonerd stuff vs. vampires and ray guns.).  I also don’t do Really Super Dark stuff — I get nightmares.  So anything on the lighter side is fine, though.  Non-fic is fine, if it’s entertaining.

Tell me what you’re reading.

It’s been a little over a week now since I decided to give myself a bedtime.

I know.  That sounds like I’m eight years old and whining that I’m not tired.  (Which is actually probably closer to the truth than I want to admit.)

But seriously…had to be done.

The initial reports are mixed.

Most days, I’m glad to report, are going okay.  I’ve been able to hie my sorry butt to the bed all days but two.  (One weekend, with husbeastie, and one where I was just wired, for no apparent reason.)  Most days, I’m up at or before the alarm at five a.m..  The day I went to bed an hour late, I actually woke myself up almost exactly on time, one hour later.  It was weird.  And kind of cool.

I’m finding two problems so far:  I either wake up way too early and have to force myself back to sleep, which means I’m grouchy when the alarm goes off, or I fall asleep too early.  I’m sure it’s my weird metabolism, but if I eat dinner before about 7 p.m., I’m asleep in the chair a half-hour later.  If I can make it through the digesting fatigue, then I’m fine, but sometimes, I can’t.  Changing when I eat fixed that almost immediately, which is both awesome and weird.

The ugly truth:

Days that I exercise, I sleep better and have way more energy.

Dammit.  I hate when the experts are right.

I’m not even talking about get-out-there-and-sweat exercise, either.  Just walking does it.

Aaaand there goes my last excuse to be lazy.

The good part:

I’m way more productive when I sleep.  Which I already knew.  And it may not be just the sleeping — I cut out most online time this week, and surprise, surprise! I’m getting way more other stuff done.  Writing, holiday stuff, house stuff.  ::headdesk::  Duh.  I blame the internet-fast for the time to do things, but the sleeping thing for the increased energy to do those things.

Details, details:

If you know me at all, you know I’m kind of a word geek and a numbers geek.  So I did set up a spreadsheet with my bedtimes and awake times, any dreams, and my energy levels for the day.  (Just a plain ol’ google spreadsheet with a form so it’s easy to fill in in the mornings.)

Aside from finding out that I dream way too much about deadly glowing-eyed gnomes, I’m also finding that days where I sleep around 6 hours are optimal.  I don’t feel tired, I’m good when I get up, and I don’t get tired too early.  Which kind of throws traditional you-must-get-eight-hours wisdom to the sidelines, at least in my case.  If I sleep more than that, I’m grouchy.  If I sleep less, I’m exhausted.

So six hours it is.

Hooray for learning things.

I figure another two or three weeks, and the schedule will be habit, which is what I’m looking for.  I know there’ll be days that don’t follow it for one reason or another, but I’m aiming generally for being in bed by ten, which kind of puts me in the old fogie category, but means I’m up early enough to get stuff done in the mornings, so I’m fine with that.

Wish me luck.

Absence makes the heart…

All the “experts” tell you not to acknowledge the whole lack-of-writing thing on a blog.  They say people don’t care why you’ve gone an unholy amount of time without writing anything, and to just dive in.  (Of course, by mentioning it, I’m mentioning it.  Faux pas: now you can has one. Meta, meta, duck.)

Work got crazy, then got more crazy, then inertia set in.  Because it happens.  (And will probably happen again, because that’s life.)

But there are a couple things kicking around the ol’ headmeats, and I figure there’s no time like the present.

So, hi there.  Long time, no see.

Expert advice thus unheeded, let’s talk about simplicity and sleep.

This past three-ish months have been nutsoballs crazypants.  Two giant opportunities landed in my lap (both for offline, community-based work projects), followed closely by a third (also community-based, but with a digital component).  They were big enough that I had to do some very quick rearranging of the priorities, or risk efficiency in everything.

What this actually meant, to me, was that my personal projects and stuff I was playing with?  All gone.  My big chalkboard to-do-list planner had to be wiped completely clean to make room for work stuff, because even one of the two big honker opportunities would have been a full-time endeavor for most folks; having two and a half plus personal projects was courting disaster.  Or breakdown.  Possibly both.

Long story short, I ended up passing on the first opportunity and taking what was behind doors two and three, and haven’t been all that disappointed by the choice.  It’s been busy, sure, but it’s the good busy, where you get to feel like you’re doing something that matters.  I love that.

What I learned, though, I love even more.

1.  I learned that an opportunity isn’t an opportunity if there’s crappy communication.  I didn’t pursue the first thing because it was a brand-new entity in my hometown, and the communication from the governing body was atrocious.  If someone can’t answer a phone, the chances are probably pretty good that achieving any goals is going to be an uphill battle, and I don’t have time, personally, to chase down approval.  Some people are fine with that kind of thing, but bureaucracy makes me insane, and I’m better off focusing my attention elsewhere.

2.  I learned that not having a stuffed project list with a billion to-dos on it means more time to do what matters. Duh, right?  But finally letting go of a bunch of things that I could only give partial attention to has both made me decidedly uncomfortable and decidedly more focused.  I like being busy.  I’m still busy.  But I’m not crazy-scattered now, which is an awesome side-effect of letting go.

3.  I learned the importance of puttering. When you’re literally scheduled in fifteen-minute increments, it’s hard to work in time for stuff like thinking.  (Or breathing, or eating, or sleeping.)  In these last few weeks, I’ve been finding that that whole balance thing that I’m so not good at?  It’s much easier when you can take an hour to think about it all.  I can see much more clearly where I need to change things or modify methods.

Yay, life’s a process!  Boo, life’s a process!

A year ago, I made the decision to make some changes.  (See also: this entire blog.)  But in typical Me Fashion, I thought I could just decide, and make everything happen at once.  And then, I ended up all surprised when only a few of them stuck.

(I know, I know.  Simple math.)

Koreans have a proverb:  If you want to dig a hole, dig one at a time.

Me?  I got the backhoe and said screw that single hole nonsense.  I’m digging me a canyon.

(And the universe laaaaaughed.)

So now, after some puttering time, some forced-rearrangement of priorities, and a much cleaner slate, I’m looking forward to 2013 as another year of changes…but in a much more sane kind of way.  One hole at a time.

Many of the overall goals are the same, most leading to a simpler, more balanced life.  Just not all at once.  I’m looking for the most basic ones with the biggest impact, and plan to grow from there, rather than trying to dig the canyon all at once.  Dig as long as I need to to make it stick.  (Which I fully expect to drive me batshit insane sometimes, since stuff like that can’t really be scheduled.  Might take a week; might take eight.  Who knows?  Aaaargh.)

First things first:  sleeping.

This entry’s long and pictureless, so I’ll make this brief-ish.

This morning, a friend of mine joked with me that, if he didn’t know me, he’d think I was on meth since I appear to hate sleeping so much.

Ouch.

Here’s my deal, though:  Even when I was a kid, I was lucky to sleep six hours a day.  Most of time, it was more like four.  Less in the summer.  I distinctly remember being about eight years old, and setting my alarm for four a.m. so I could do some kind of nature thing at dawn.  (And, uh, waking up before the alarm went off, too.  My poor, poor sleep-deprived parents…)

These days, I go a few weeks of sleeping four or five hours, tops, and then have a day or two where I sleep for ten. Presumably to catch up.  I’m just not tired at all, even though I’m fairly certain it’s not all that great for my body.

Add to my natural tendency to sleep very little….the fact that I’m a big four-year-old inside. I will fight going to bed.  Even when I’m falling asleep sitting up.  Because, you know, sleep is for the weak.  Or something.  But I can get just one more thing done if I fight it, so fight it, I do.  Sleep is the enemy.  And that’s got to change.

So the first hole I’m digging is learning how to sleep like a normal human being.

There are a ton of studies that say that how well and how much you sleep affects everything from your immune system (mine’s held together with tissue paper and used chewing gum most of the time — I’ve got a cold as we speak.) to your productivity, and a whole range of things inbetween.  When I  googled up healthy sleeping tips, there were a whole range of opinions and hacks, but two were the biggest:

1.  Optimal duration is right around 7 to 8 hours.  Which may drive me nuts.  And,

2.  Going to bed at the same time every day and just laying there until you fall asleep are the two bigg’uns for training  your brain to shut down.  I’m fairly certain that before my brain’s trained, this will be like trying to force a watermelon through the eye of a needle.  But I’m willing to try for the next 30 days or so, in the interest of Science.

I’m also thinking very hard about picking up a Jawbone Up or a FitBit Ultra, both of which not only track your steps and such (which would be nice, though mine would probably read single digits half the time…), but also track your sleeping, to varying degrees.  (The Up actually tracks your micro-movements, which gives you a nice graph of when you’re in REM sleep.  Not sure about the FitBit tracking on it, but I believe it does something similar, but not as accurate.  I’m still deciding which of the two is a better unit overall.)

Other things that might roll right into this:  supposedly, periods of fairly-intense exercise will lead to better, deeper sleep (yikes), and cutting down or cutting out caffeine is supposed to help, too.  Which scares me a bit, since I’m kind of monster-like without coffee.  Monstrous and exhausted, so I just yell a lot while laying on the floor.  I’m more apt to try the periods of intense exercise first, just to protect those who live with me here.

One quickie note, too:

When I started Finer Fruits, I really wanted it to be more about you than about me.  To be all informative and junk.

I’m kind of heading in another direction for 2013.  Blogging experts can go be experts somewhere else…I’m probably just going to babble here about what I’mdoing, for my own records.  You may find some of it helpful, you may not.  Some of it might be entertaining, some might not.  There may be more entries, there may be less.  I really don’t know.  But I figure I have this space and it’s easy enough for me to update when I want to, so…there ’tis.  Less of a resource, more like peeking into my record.

I hope it can still be marginally helpful, even to those folks not wearing my pants.

So I grew some eggplant, see.

Back in May, a local boy scout troop donated about five billion plants to the Community Garden where I’ve got a couple plots.  Most of them were well-marked, but there were a couple flats of these really pretty mystery plants, completely unlabeled.  Some of them were recognizable — tomatoes of some variety, either a zucchini or a squash thing, some kohlrabi.  But these really pretty ones, nobody seemed to want.  I grabbed one and stuck it in the dirt, and when they were all starting to wither and almost ready to be tossed, I grabbed another five to save them from the dumpster.

The problem, of course, with planting vegetable plants is that, at the end, you have vegetables.

A fact that, apparently, eluded me.  They were pretty, and some kind of veggie, so they couldn’t be too bad, I figured.

And then the eggplants came.

And came.

And came.

This is from a few days ago.  And it’s not all of them.  There are about a dozen of them in the kitchen right now, and that’s after two days’ worth of eggplant parmesan, a pot-full of ratatouille from a recipe a friend sent me, and slicing & roasting & freezing another dozen or so.

And they’re still coming, people.

There are another good dozen on the plants, not including the teeny-tiny ones that just burst out of the woodwork when the drought broke (which probably won’t get big enough to harvest before the frost starts happening, to be honest).  Clearly, my garden soil is the perfect growing composition for eggplant, because if they were any happier, I’d be turning purple right now.

There’s a quandary, though.

I have no idea what else to do with them.  I’ve frozen diced eggplant, roasted eggplant, and sliced eggplant.  I froze some of the parmesan.  I froze garlic-roasted eggplant.  Half my freezer is eggplant.  (Oh, woe is me, having too much food.  I know, I know.  First world homesteader problem.)

I’m about to start randomly leaving bags of it in neighbors’ cars, the way I had to with the jalapenos last year.  (Which, by the way, I also have three gallon-sized freezer bags full of, including one roasted bag in the freezer for using later on.  THAT, however, I’m making into hot sauce.  Sadly, eggplants don’t make good hot sauce.  It’s a little too bland.)

So what do you do with eggplant, folks?

I’m at the end of my ideas, here.  Local food bank doesn’t want them, almost everyone I know has been loaded up with them (by me), and I don’t want them to go bad — that’d kind of defeat the purpose of all the weeding and watering I did this summer.

I’m open to try just about anything at this point.

Any undertaking can be a little daunting sometimes.

After all, you’re learning all kinds of new things.  And learning new things tends to change  you.  It’s that whole “when you know better, you do better” adage.

Thing is:  it can be a little bit stressful.  (Says the Queen of Understatement.)

This past  year’s been a bit of a learning experience for me.

Obviously.

And any time there’s change, there’s also resistance.  Sometimes from other people, and sometimes, from inside my own head, which may not have been all that comfortable with where things were, but also doesn’t like being in that place of Newness, where changes — even positive ones — are kind of scary.  (If I don’t stay up all night and do stuff until I fall down, will I get it all done?  Will cutting back my work hours mean everything tanks?  If I grow my own food, what happens if I do it wrong and kill my whole family with botulism?) 

I didn’t say it was logical, because fears rarely are.  Just that they’re there.  And that it creates stress.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m stressed out, I start talking to myself horribly.

(I don’t mean, like, sitting on a street corner, babbling about aliens and radar chips embedded in my skull, by the way.  I mean the normal self-talk that we all engage in — the dialogue that goes through our heads directed at ourselves.  Sometimes referred to as the Inner Critic.)

The things that I say to me, I’d never say to another human being.  And since sometimes, I have precisely zero filter and have been known to say some pretty boneheadded things to people, that’s saying something.  We’re talking completely out of proportion commentary, even.  I screw up a link in someone’s newsletter, and the Critic tells me that surely, everyone will know it was my fault (since it was), that I’m a complete screwup trainwreck, and I’ll never work again.  Can’t figure out a poorly-documented plugin?  Of course that means that I’m a completely useless idiot who should go wash dishes for a living, though even that might be too complicated for someone as stupid as I am.  Forget to return a friend’s phone call?  Surely that’s a sign that I’m a self-centered jerk who would be better served by living in a cabin somewhere like a hermit so I can’t hurt anyone ever again.

Then, of course, I become aware of what I’m saying to myself, realize that it’s all self-pitying bullshit, and beat myself up for a while about that, too.

Like I said:  It isn’t rational or logical.  It just is. 

And moreover, almost every person I’ve ever talked to does this exact same thing, to various degrees.  We get stressed out, we get insecure or depressed, and the Critic comes out to play, like having a little mopey demon on our collective shoulders, telling us exactly what we don’t need to hear.

Combatting that little voice can be a huge battle.

It’s hard to know where to even start, since it’s not like a regular battle.  It’s inside your own head, which is dark and kind of squishy, and thoughts are very slippery things.

Chris Brogan (who’s a marketing guy, for those of you who aren’t familiar) wrote a really great post about how he’s facing those inner sh*t-talkers head-on.  His process isn’t quick and easy  (at the very minimum, it’ll take you a good week just to get started, and much more than that to gain momentum with it), but it does combat the irrational voice with a rational correction, like shining a big honkin’ truth-light on the shadowy demon on your shoulder.

His solution’s much better than my own, which has generally been to just endure it and wait passively for rationality and perspective to make a comeback.

So how do you deal with that little critical voice?

In times of stress or overwork, when you’re already on shaky footing, or in those times when you’re doing something new and scary — how do you hold the demons at bay?  I’d love to hear your own strategies for dealing with the screaming mimis and the hypercritical demons.

How do you talk to yourself instead?

I always seem to put off the hardest parts ’til last.

I don’t mean to.  I mean to be one of those highly-effective people who picks the hardest thing off the to-do list and do it first thing in the morning, because that’s what all the “experts” tell you is the best thing to do.

The problem, of course, is that when I get up, my head is full of sand and zombielike coffee cravings.  And that’s all.

I have a good hour where I just putter and stare blankly, and on a good day, I might even make the bed.  On a really good day, I might even answer an email.  An, as in singular.

I’ve tried other things, but the fact of the matter is that, in reality, I’m kind of useless first thing in the morning.  I’m perky, I’m semi-awake, I’m always happy…but effective, I am not.

So the hard stuff tends to wait until I’ve got sufficient sand-removal from the brainmeats before I start it.

Generally, this works out okay.  I do better work, instead of just working to be moving.  I send people emails that actually make sense.  And I’ve got the presence of mind to remember not to push red, shiny, candylike buttons that break technological things I might be working on at the time.  (The same is not true for first-thing-in-the-morning or late-at-night working.  I can break very simple things at fifty feet.)

Which is probably why the to-do lists came last this week.

I had to clear out all the rest of the digital sand before I could really focus on how to make things easier for myself when it comes to actual action-taking.  I know.  That sounds counterproductive.  But when you’ve got multiple irons in multiple fires, the ad hoc organization/task system that kind of organically develops over time can feel pretty darn overwhelming to change  – even when you know that something more easily accessed would make things a bazillion times easier to actually do.

See why I left the hard stuff for last now?

Right now, as I mentioned before, I think, I use workflowy for “capture”.

And for this, it’s flippin’ awesome.  It’s structured like a great big outline, in one long list of every kind of thing imaginable.  It’s pretty close to how my brain works, too, which is why it’s been so effective for me in the past.  I’ve got everything from stream of consciousness ideas (which is more like a raging, torrential river, really.) to action items, all in one place, alongside resources and such.  If it’s got a firm deadline, the deadline goes in my iCal.

The problem is that the more prolific the ideas or projects, the less easy it is to find what I need.

My workflowy list, right now, reads like War & Peace … only longer and more ponderous.  I love it.  I continue to use it.  It’s still the best thing for getting ideas out of my head and onto digital “paper”.  But hooboy…is it ever not easy to find specific things, unless I skim the whole list.  (Or at least the list of top-level topics.)

I used to use a Mac-specific task program called “Things”, by the way.

I loved that I could add to-do-list items with a keyboard shortcut from anywhere, which helped with the had-an-idea-but-forgot-it thing.  But a) it was expensive, and had frequent updates for the iPhone app and desktop bits, and b) never sync’ed all that easily.  So to get things off the mobile app, I had to do these weird rain-dances and appeal to the God of Technology with a PC sacrifice at dawn on the full moon, and even then, he was a tempermental snot sometimes.  And if something’s not easy, I won’t keep up with it, plain and simple.

So I tried other things.

I tried rememberthemilk.  I tried tasklist and wunderlist and wordpress plugins and website apps and other paid apps/programs.  I gave up on digital and tried using notebooks:  GTD systems and an interesting list-type thing called Autofocus.  (Which, by the way, is the most like workflowy, and is a good place to start if you’re more pen-and-ink than mouse-and-screen.)

At this point, I probably have fifteengazillion orphaned to-do-lists all over the internet.  Most filled with stuff I’ve either done or don’t care about anymore, in fact.  It’s kind of sad.  Poor motherless action items.

For work, though, I settled on Trello, and I’ll tell you why:

1.  You can make it as simple (leaving the to-do/doing/done boards as-is) or as complex as you want, adding more boards for other things.  (I often add a “someday” board, with things I’d like to do if there’s time/energy/interest.)

2.  It can be collaborative, on a board-by-board basis — you just invite collaborators to the board.  (For those like me, with seventythousandmillion diverse clients, it’s a godsend feature.)

3.  It’s multi-media (you can add photos or files for specific things), and you can color-code, for things like priority.  (It’s a good visual reminder that yes, the content-writing is more important than tweaking a theme, for example.)

If you’re a programmer or something project-managey, OpenProj is probably a better choice, by the way.  There are no milestones or anything to measure things.  Just lists with “cards” for each task, like a pinboard.  It’s good for us creative folks.

So now, I think I want Trello to be not just for work.

My personal projects are copious.  Probably from my preternatural fear of being bored.

Psychology/neurosis aside, I think this might be a good system to keep track of the to-dos for each of those, since it’s so easy to visualize what’s done and what’s not — and what’s important and what’s not.

Here’s my issue:  I have no idea how to organize it.

Do I put in a board for each sub-project, since they all have their own to-dos?  Or just a board for each main project, and have cards for each sub-thing in that overarching project?  And if it’s the former, will that just be digital clutter again in six months, if I decide not to go in that direction?  Or will it choke each board with sub-project to-dos if I go with the latter?

It’s making my head feel all spinny.

I do know that leaving it all unorganized on a giant list (workflowy) isn’t working.  Even when my computer screams at me that it’s time to do something for XYZ Project (thank you, Goal Reminder! extension for Chrome), it takes me the better part of a few wasted minutes to scan the whole list and see what, if anything, needs to be done.  And for someone like myself, who tends to be crazy-ADD with the attention-span, sometimes it means I wander off for pie and forget to do anything at all by the time I’ve gone through part of the ponderous list.

Let me just say, too:  I hate being disorganized.

Like, HATE it, hate it.  Like, smack-my-head-on-the-nearest-wall hate it.  It’s one thing to have some kind of technical issue, or to run up against unforseen complications (which happens), or to make a conscious choice not to do something in favor of something more productive.  Those things happen.  But it’s another thing altogether to not get something done because I forgot about it or because I didn’t effectively store the item until I had the time to work on it.  I hate that.

Can you see why I put this off until last?  It’s crazymaking.

So my question for you is this:

How do you keep everything straight?  If you have multiple projects of endeavors going on at once, I really want to hear from you.  If you’ve got insight into the best way to organize the trello pinboards, I’m all for listening to your genius opinions.  How do you keep from forgetting things?  Am I overcomplicating this, as I’m wont to do sometimes, and should I just find a simpler solution?

I’ll say this:  things almost always have to be visible for me to remember them.  If it’s not open, sometimes I forget things exist.  Perils of Ooh Shiny Syndrome.  So having things in one place is preferable to multiple places, and the less organization that’s needed to stay, well, organized, the better.

Gimme your wisdom, people.

I can use all the help I can get in shaking this brainsand out of my head.

Just a quickie today:

We talked the other day about purging out the digital stuffs.

And in a fit of synchronicity, Kam from Campfire Chic is doing a challenge to get rid of all the extraneous digital fluffiness you may still have around.

Go check out the introductory post if you want to follow along with her step-by-step journey.