Organize IT

I’m pleased to announce that this month marks the third birthday of Organize IT. Unfortunately there won’t be a party or cake but I’m still very proud of this achievement, and just a little bit amazed because, ignoring such things as holidays and the little matter of my wedding last year, this blog has been active each and every week of those three years. Given that most blogs die a lonely, neglected death within their first month, it’s safe to say I’m pretty damn happy with what I’ve achieved so far.

Clutter is a big problem for numerous reasons – it gets in the way, it makes it difficult to find stuff. In fact, I think that de-cluttering your surroundings is so important to your overall wellbeing I have an entire section called Clutter 101 dedicated to it. But what about the psychological effect? It’s great being able to find your keys, know exactly where your passport is and not have to dig through piles of paperwork to find that old receipt, but it goes much deeper than that.

Something a little different today. Recently David Allen (just some guy who developed this thing called GTD, heard of him?) passed the one million followers mark on Twitter. Maybe I’m biased because Twitter is the only social networking site I actually have any interest in (in contrast to all my friends Facebook luvin’) but I find it’s great for getting little bitesized bits of insight and information. Naturally David Allen is no different when it comes to sharing pearls of productivity related wisdom so it seemed like a good idea to compile his top ten tweets. Enjoy!

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The to-do list is perhaps one of the oldest staples for anybody trying to get organized and productive. Whether it’s on paper or as part of an app, it’s such a simple concept – write down a list of things you need to do and tick them off as you complete them. Unfortunately, as our workload has got more complicated and large over the years, so too as the traditional to-do list. It can take a little bit more thought and organization to make it work and that can cause problems. So, I thought I’d create a list of the most common problems I’ve come across and how you can fix them.

In the process of writing Monday’s post on why I prefer the almighty pen and paper combination above all else, I ironically started to feel a slight twinge of curiosity about all those GTD apps out there. Most of the GTD related tweets on Twitter revolve around people’s experiments with different apps and I pretty much always skipped over them… until now.