Organize IT

This is a guest post by Emma Newman of Post Apocalyptic Publishing.

I once heard that former British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher said “Happiness is a ticked off list”. I have no idea if that’s true, but regardless of how one might have felt about her politics, I can certainly relate to that statement. I always write a to-do list for every project, and having recently completed a major one, I realised something about the process that causes it all to break down.

I’ve written a lot about being organized and de-cluttering your life, in fact I did an entire book about it (you can download it for free here). It was one of the first big ‘lifehacks’ that I really mastered and it made such a difference to me. In fact I converted several other people, including my own parents, to the idea of decluttering (it backfired slightly because they started focusing on the stuff I’d left at their home when I’d got my own place).

I’ve been a bit busy these past few weeks getting the blog updated for 2010, so I thought I’d do one big post to share with you all what’s been happening. Firstly, you may have noticed it now has a new design. Gone is the sunflower theme which had absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the blog, and in its place is something a little more fitting (well I think so anyway). I wanted to avoid spending countless hours doing my own re-design so I bought a custom theme, and then ended up spending countless hours tweaking that instead (don’t ask). Anyways, I like it and I hope you do too. Share your feedback!

Several years ago I signed up to a gym. My attendance was patchy at best, despite all my intentions and it took a further two years, and changing to a different gym, before I finally got into a routine of going every week. Looking back, I think a lot of the problem was that I expected immediate results. I tried so many routines both at the gym and at home, from trying to go for regular jogs to simply doing pushups at home, only to ditch them within a month. My motivation would disappear because it was so heavily dependent on short term results. As any regular gym-goer will probably agree, results don’t happen overnight.

A couple of months ago I posed a little question on Twitter, having spent quite a bit of time figuring out how best to categorize Organize IT. I was surprised by the number of people who responded with their opinions and preferences. Productivity, personal development, lifestyle design, or other? What’s the name for all of this? What are all us bloggers actually writing about? And does it really matter what it gets called? Of course not, but it would be interesting to see what the general consensus is…