Productivity and organization are two areas I’ve always been interested in, for work and at home. Why? I belong to the school of “what can I do to minimize my time from doing one-off custom work and make sure it is repeatable to teach to others?” It’s because I don’t want to re-invent the wheel and I want to enable others to do the same (i.e. not go through the same issues I ran across). Because, time is the one thing you cannot buy more of, no matter how much we all would like to. 🙂
That works well for work, and is something I am still trying to do for home with my hobbies, fitness and general housekeeping. Over the years I’ve tried several methods and knickknacks, digital and real world versions of things to get things done better and more efficiently.
And it all distills to…sometimes you try something and it didn’t work and you try it again a little differently until it works for you…and then until it doesn’t or it sort of still does, and you iterate through. A bit of the Kaizen method, if you will.
And for me, it seems digital is the way to go for work, and a mix of analog/digital for home.
For work, it’s…the Getting Things Done method coupled with Evernote, Skitch, Skype and Google apps. And then it’s good old fashioned pen and paper and the Bullet Journal method with a smattering of One Note, Evernote and a ScanScap scanner to digitize analog stuff.
I love journals and day planners, I love the possibilities when faced with a brand new, unused one, but at the end of the day, it will never look pretty, or printed neatly like you see in those Pinterest pins (lies, people’s schedules are NEVER set in stone as they are brightly decorated and adorned per planner page :P). I know, because I used those systems in the early 2000s and had the battered, illegible scribblings to prove it. 🙂
Curious to see how much this outlook will change in the next little bit. Who knows, sometimes what’s old is new again…maybe the Hipster PDA will make a comeback!
