For Beginner

Obsessed with lists how I organize my life

A little while back, I wrote about my obsession with the apocalypse. Today, Im going to talk about a slightly different obsession: lists. To be honest, not many people see this side of me. However, its a big part of who I am and how I get things done, and perhaps by sharing it, itll help others. Or perhaps youll realize Im an OCD maniac and end up avoiding me in the hallways.



Write down everything

I have long since accepted the fact that my memory is fallible and limited, so I tend to write down just about everything. Paper and digital media tend to be much more reliable and easier to search than my mind. As youll see in the rest of this blog post, I keep lists for everything you can think of, from my agenda for the day, to the groceries I need to buy, to the books I want to read.

A big part of making this an effective system is developing the discipline to (a) write down everything, as soon as possible and (b) strong search/organization skills so I can then find the relevant information in my many lists. When I get it right, I can very quickly access data from all aspects of my life in a matter of seconds.

Tools of the trade

One of the things I struggle with is picking the right tools for my many lists. Ive tried a huge variety with varying degrees of success and am continuously on the lookout for better options - if you know of any, please let me know in the comments. Ive found that with note & list tools, there are a number of trade-offs to consider: speed, searchability, accessibility, price, support for sharing, and tuning for specific tasks. The rest of this blog post will be a list - go figure - of some of the tools that I currently use and their pros and cons.



Even though Im a die-hard technologist, I find that pen and paper is still the best choice in certain circumstances. In particular, for my daily agenda, note taking, and shopping lists, I have not found a single digital device that can compare in terms of speed & efficiency. I had high hopes the iPad would finally replace my notebook, but I found typing to be too clunky (especially since I diagram and doodle a lot), finger drawing too imprecise, and the whole device just a little too heavy, both physically and in terms of UI. Perhaps a stylus and a well tuned app would do the trick, but I havent seen it yet.

Pros:

• Lightning fast
• Good for writing and drawing

Cons

• Not searchable
• Hard to organize: post-it notes, tabs, and bookmarks are fairly clunky
• Not easily sharable
• Easily lost
• Not always available ("doh, I left it at the office!")

Use cases:

• Daily agenda: a short list of items I plan on getting done for the day.
• Note taking: I have not found anything that can match pen and paper when taking notes while listening to a live speaker or presentation.
• Grocery list: another short list that I put together in a hurry and then dispose of.

http://docs.google.com

Text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings in the cloud. For free. This is my weapon of choice for the VAST majority of things that dont need quite the speed of pen & paper. I keep so much info in Google Docs at this point that Id be in a lot of trouble if anything ever happened to the service.


Pros:

• Accessible everywhere you have the internet - even editable on a smartphone!
• Searchable
• Easy to organize using tags/folders
• Easy to share and collaborate

 Cons:

• Not quite as fast as pen and paper, especially for quick sketches

http://www.springpadit.com

Technically a "note app", but it also supports storing a huge variety of items: bookmarks, tasks, events, wines, movies, products and more. There is an HTML5 web interface, iPhone app and browser plugins for both Firefox and Chrome.

Pros:

• Great interface for capturing webpages (bookmarks), as the browser plugins can scrape the page you are viewing, grab a thumbnail, the URL, title and description all from one click. 
• Supports tags for effective organization
• Accessible on a wide variety of devices

Cons:

• Agonizingly slow. Because of this, Im slowly migrating off of SpringPad and really only use it for bookmarks now.
• Buggy: the Firefox plugin sometimes randomly vanishes from the browser. Text entry and auto complete are both clunky.

Use cases:

• Storing bookmarks: I bookmark anything I might want later - primarily software tools and guides - and tag it. For example, the 3 web development tools and 3 more web development tools blog posts were created by just going into SpringPad, clicking "bookmarks" and selecting my "Web Developer" tag.

Google tasks

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/tasks/

Very simple task tracking application. I primarily use it because its integrated into gmail, so I see it all the time.

Pros:

• Simple and easy to use
• Integrated into gmail, gcal and iPhone

Cons:

• Clunky UI
• No reminders

Use cases:

• Unimportant or on-going tasks: since its in gmail, I know that anything I put in here will get seen very often. I often put on-going tasks in here so I get reminded of them daily.

Living Social

http://books.livingsocial.com

Most people know LivingSocial as a daily deal site. However, before they got into deals, they had a great app for tracking books, movies, tv shows, video games and more. You could add books/movies/shows/games to your "collection" as something you had read/watched/played (along with a rating and review) or something that you wanted to read/watch/play. The ability to track all of these types of media in one place attracted me to the service and I used it fairly heavily: I had 260 books, 500 movies and 60 tv shows in my collection.

Unfortunately, ever since their daily deals business got big, they stopped developing features for the "media" site, didnt fix bugs, and didnt respond to requests. Today, I found out they are shutting the whole service down - if you use it, make sure to export your data before its gone. Im pretty disappointed by this and will now have to find a new place to track all the different types of media I interact with.

Pros:

• Huge database with images and descriptions
• Decently sized user-base, including quite a few of my facebook friends
• Decent UI for adding items to your collection, tagging them and rating/reviewing them
• One place for all types of media

Cons:

• The service is now dead.

Use cases:

• Media tracking: books, movies, tv shows, video games

GoodReads

http://www.goodreads.com/

A service built specifically to help you build a collection of books, both those youve already read (and optionally reviewed) as well as those you want to read. I actually used goodreads a few years ago, but switched to LivingSocial because they also had movies, tv shows, video games, etc. Now that LivingSocial is dead, I might go back to goodreads.

Pros:

• Huge database of books
• Lots of authors seem to use the site
• Good reviews and ratings from the memberbase
• UI well tuned for tracking books

Cons:

• Not too many of my friends are using it
• Only tracks books

Use cases:

• Tracking books: reviews, to-read lists

Google calendar

https://www.google.com/calendar

Not exactly a list, but I couldnt talk about keeping my life organized without mentioning Google Calendar. In the same way that gmail is vastly superior to every email client ever built by Microsoft or Apple, Google Calendar is head and shoulders above Exchange, Outlook, iCal, etc. All my other calendars feed into it. My phone is synced to it. My life revolves around it.

Pros:

• Clean, easy to use UI
• Very flexible reminders/alerts
• Accessible from any browser and my iPhone

Cons:

• We still use exchange at work for some reason

Use cases:

• Scheduling: if its not on my calendar, its not happening.