How to organise the mental and physical chaos in my life?

Question

I have been reading and experimenting with techniques for many years. I have read the GTD book among dozens of others but I still can't find the answers to everyday problems. Working as a Web design/development freelancer and as an Administrator at the same time, I have tried countless ways to organise data, todo lists, applications, notes etc. and take control of my life. Every time I go a little further and then fail.

Expecting too much of myself usually leads me to fear of failure and procrastination. The hundreds of tasks to accomplish, plus errands plus exceptional cases, always confuse me and finally depress me. I have different operating systems for work and home, many email accounts, different applications I must use for home/business etc.

I would like to kindly ask for your opinion on my organisation technique right now. why do you think it fails and what do you suggest me to do?

I use (home/freelance/mac os x): - Asana for organising projects and tasks - Workflowy to keep a "draft daily paper-like list" - Google drive (spreadsheets mostly) to keep my finance and goals data - Evernote for keeping notes - Google calendar for scheduling. I have created a calendar for each "life category": professional, health, spiritual, intellectual, family, etc. - Mail for sending/receiving emails

I find great difficulty to deal with project data. I have a separate folder X for each project in a folder called "projects", then a X folder in my /htdocs/ folder, a folder in Asana with project tasks to accomplish, a folder in Evernote with notes and data, a folder in google drive with documents I need access from elsewhere etc.

I find a great difficulty also in scheduling. I have tried to set "blocks" of time each day to accomplish a task and simply it does not work. I have tried to accurately schedule tasks like 15.00-15.45 This, 16.00-16.45 That etc. and they fail because of the exceptional tasks and errands. Finally everything pile up and even I feel self-confident with lots of inner power to accomplish something, I see hundreds of tasks, I ask myself "God, when am I going to do all these? I am going to be old before I even realise I have completed some projects." I imagine myself losing contact with time and family, trying to accomplish a really endless list of infinite tasks...

Answer 1

You should try to cut down on the tools.

At least insofar as to put all your tasks in one place, the reference files can be anywhere.

I have exactly your setup, except using "producteev" instead of Asana. ;) I just started Workflowy, but I aim in part to make it a substitute for other solutions - not to expand my tool range. My recommendations:

• If you have many projects, try "podio" and throw it all in there! It will help you dump Asana.*
• Stop setting time-blocks, simply start working! ROWE. No one cares when or how you did the work.
• Dump the /htdocs/ thing.
• Stop expecting from yourself to expand intellectually and spiritually (unless you're a very religious person). It's impossible to take MOOC courses just on the side, you'll incur large opportunity costs. Other than that, I throw all my reading things in one cloud-synced folder and articles into Pocket, even though I know I'll never be able to read it all - but it alleviates the stress for me.
• Ask your wife / girlfriend for help and her opinion! I somehow rarely see women posting about this, they are often gifted in regards to time-management and organization.
• Stop this calendar-complexity - you only have 24h a day anyways! Just use repeat tasks and colors.

*I have my reasons not to use podio for me individually, but I'm currently using it collaboratively.

Answer 2

You sound a bit like me. Some of my challenges are:

• I spend more time "getting organised" than actually accomplishing very much
• I've got too many "systems" for organisation, so I have to look in lots of places to find the information I need.
• I've got far too many projects on the go.
• I'm not really motivated to get much of this stuff done anyway.

The solution is obvious, but much much harder than it sounds: I need to stop thinking of this as an organisational problem. Instead, I need to cut back and focus.

The first thing I need to decide which projects really matter and then to literally dump the rest. Dumping a project means ruthlessly getting rid of everything in my life that has anything to do with that project. Not just shelve, but completely eliminate all reference to that project. There is no doubt that this will hurt, but if the death of one project gives life to another then the sacrifice is worth it.

Rinse and repeat.

Answer 3

You are overloaded and need to reduce the number of activities. You may also be using too many tools and as a result end up with too much overhead work.

Now, how to focus on right stuff? Consider Steven Covey's matrix below and imagine your tasks placed in it according to level of urgency and importance:

Primarily, you need to focus on urgent and important tasks (quadrant 1). Then, what do you need to do? Many people go to quadrant 3 and do urgent non-important stuff. That's wrong. You should go to quadrant 2, making sure those non-urgent important things never even get to quadrant 1. Forget about non-important stuff.

For more inspiration, watch Randy Pausch Lecture: Time Management.

Answer 4

First, until you get a handle on the many things you have to do at work, dump the personal projects.

Next, stop using all these tools. What you need is a priority list and the files for your projects and nothing else.

I'm going to make a radical suggestion that you keep your priority list on a piece of paper. Why? Because it is faster and you can see it without changing the display on your monitors. If you must also do an update for a company system, do that at the end of the work day (yes every day).

It seems to me that your real problem isn't organizational, it is the nature of the work. I too spend a lot of time doing project work that is constantly interrupted by production support. The key is to tell the stakeholders of the project work that there is a delay when you get called to do emerging work and to note what you were working on in your project notes before switching tasks to make it easier to pick up where you left off. Never accept a higher priority task without letting people know their task will be delayed. If you want concentrated time to work on something, then rearrange your work hours so that you either work later or earlier than the norm for your company.

Remember that all that organizational advice you are reading is directed at managers who can simply delegate the work away instead of having to do it. I have never seen it be practical at the non-supervisory level.

Answer 5

From your question, and from the comment conversations on the answers already given, it is very plain that your mental approach is core to the issue, not the type or number of organisational tools.

For work:

it is very useful to have a tool or small set of tools to manage customer/team/project tasks in a structured way, but the tools you choose should be chosen based on how well they map your mental planning structures.

At work, there is no point accepting a hundred tasks if you cannot manage a hundred, so step one should be taking a realistic look at how many tasks you can handle. Especially if you are in recovery from illness, burnout, or in fact anything that impacted your work processes. If you can't accept a piece of work, decline. Give reasons, but be sure to respond with something like:

I currently have these tasks which will keep me busy until next month - if you do want me to add one more task, please let me know which one I can drop to make room.

Honesty helps you and your company in these situations. Your boss should appreciate that this way tasks aren't dropped or lost, and it should be their job to prioritise what is important to them.

At home:

Simplicity helps here. Because I am the main earner in my household, and I work 40 hours more a week than my wife, my home routine is less predictable, so I haven't memorised the various tasks that she would take as obvious.

My solution is to keep a one A5 page as a to-do list. This includes essential things like "pick the kids up at 3.20" but also "pick up tomatoes and beer", "go to birthday party" and so on.

There are very few things that cross over from work to home, but occasionally I will take a shopping list with me to work, to pick up on the way home. But I don't think about it or worry about it until the moment I leave the office.

Keep those two separate where possible (I actually don't separate that well, but that is because I also volunteer in my chosen industry so a lot of my personal time is also work - but I would recommend that you do separate them unless you really love your work!)

Answer 6

I've been using this site: www.simplist.me - they are in alpha right now, so there's a lot to improve, but the concept, which is to break down the things you want/need to get done in your life into steps is super helpful for me. Another plus is that I've given them some feedback and they've actually built the thing I asked for, plus it's free! :-)