Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Tag Archives: Organization

Not so dumb

I can’t speak for “little.”

I’m talking about the blog, Dumb Little Man.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know who is behind this blog.  There’s no “About” page that I can find.  There’s no entry in Wikipedia.

All I know is the content.

(UPDATE: Thanks to my good friend, Michelle, for finding the “About” page.  Here it is!)

The subheading of the blog is “Tips for Life.”

That’s what’s in it.

Tips.

Tips for motivation, for increasing creativity,  for organizing your life, simplifying it, making it better.

Almost all of them are good advice.  Clear, cogent, well-written.  The site is well-designed.  Easy to read.  Easy to search.

The headlines to each post are masterful.  “Ten ways to do this.”  “Thirty secrets to that.”  I’m a sucker for lists, so I love that.  I figure, in a list of ten, there will almost certainly be at least one useful thing.

I like this blog so much, it’s one of the ones I have emailed to me on a daily basis.  And that I actually read.  There are a few blogs I get because they seemed promising, but now I skim the subject line and delete more often than not.  But I read Dumb Little Man.  I save a few of them.  Implementation…that’s another story, but we can always hope.

I could go on citing examples, but I’d really rather you went on over to Dumb Little Man and spent your reading time there.

It will do you more good.

Organization is the key

to lizard extraction

In yesterday’s episode, our heroine (me) made the momentous decision to remove an interloping lizard single-handedly.

For those who are not troubled by reptiles and/or other small scurrying creatures, this may not seem a sea-change* (Flapdoodle!)  But for someone who once (long ago in a galaxy far, far away) spent a terror-filled night tortured by a cricket and, somewhat later in life, nearly fell off the rocking chair she had leapt onto at the sudden appearance of a hamster in an apartment previously hamster-less, it is, indeed, the miracle which warranted beginning the story yesterday as part of our series of Monday Miracles.

In a state of mingled what-am-I-thinking and how-brave-am-I as I contemplated reptile removal, I considered the options.

The MotH** just picks them up.  As, in fact, had my grandmother and my mother, in the past, so that’s pretty much all that occurred to me, and clearly, that was what I was going to have to do.

Now, visited by sudden bravery I might be, but I am also a person with a certain amount of self-awareness.  I knew it was extremely unlikely that this resolve would be carried through bare-handed.

And this is where today’s Tuesday Tip comes into play.

Always know where your gardening gloves are!

I have several pairs of work gloves and gardening gloves, and none of them are kept in the garage (me having a healthy—some might say ‘elevated’—sense of self-preservation and no wish to encounter a brown recluse spider being reclusive alongside my index finger).  In fact, my best gardening gloves—the ones with the rubber fingers allowing for more manual dexterity than the leather work gloves—are in a drawer next to the side door.

Now, this is the important part.  Not only are they supposed to be in the drawer next to the side door, they actually are there.

Look out, lizard.

Will Elaine find her gardening gloves?  Will the lizard wait until she does?  Will this story have a happy ending?  And how did the lizard get on the window sill, anyway? 

For the answer to these and other questions, tune in tomorrow to Wondering Wednesday.

 

* Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, sc 5 (Ariel’s song)

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”

** MotH=Man of the House

Clutter, clutter everywhere

Unless. . .

If you’re on Facebook, have I got a find for you.

You know how Martha Stewart has all these great organizing and decorating tips…for the folks who won that $500 million dollars and can afford to spend six or seven hours a day weaving their own placemats?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for all that.  And the materials!

Half the time you have to make your own radish roses to attach to yew branches harvested from your own hedges to make a tasteful holiday wreath which will, in turn, be gilded by a paint recipe based on egg yolks gathered from your hand-incubated Buff Orpington chickens nesting in your home-made chicken coop modeled on Westminster Abbey.

It’s not like these are things real people actually do.

But over in New Orleans, there’s a little company called Clutter Clearer.

Each day on their Facebook page, they post two things:  An inspiration photo and a tip.

The tips are realistic, useful and require inexpensive items to implement.  More often than not, I think, “Whoa!  Why didn’t I think of that?”

The inspiration photos are just that–photos of rooms that are both attractive and well-organized.  Not every one will be to everyone’s taste, but there are good ideas in the pictures, too.

The tips on the Clutter Clearer Facebook page are the most consistently realistic ideas I’ve ever seen on a site like this.

Get on over there, search for “Clutter Clearer” in that little box at the top, and Like their page.

If you’re not on Facebook, you can find their website here.  I don’t see any tips there, however, so Facebook is better!

You know, you can read about how to knit sweaters out of wool from your herd of alpacas—or you can take some actual small steps toward organizing your environment.

Totally up to you!

You can do everything

Just not all at once.

Here’s a tip for you.

Multi-tasking is a myth.  So, there’s no point in wishing for that third hand.  Your brain can’t manage as much as you are already giving it, let alone more.

The modern world—and, for all I know, the ancient one—has led us to believe that we are faster and more efficient if we try to do more than one thing at a time.  Check your email while you make phone calls.  Write the report while you watch 60 Minutes.  (Trying to be charitable there.  Most of us are watching Dallas—or Honey Boo Boo, I guess.)

It’s all a juggling act, we say.

The truth is even a juggler is only handling one thing at a time:  a ball, a bowling pin, a fire baton.  The juggler is handling each one quickly, to be sure, and switching her attention more rapidly than most of us to the next, but she’s only handling one.  (I know.  I learned how to juggle in college. Don’t get me started on what my dad said when he realized that’s where my tuition dollars were going!)

Think about it.

Your computer multi-tasks.

Or does it?

If you’ve got any of those tools that analyze its performance, you know that it really doesn’t.  Resource allocation is the term.  Your computer is switching resources rapidly between tasks.  It looks like it’s doing more than one at a time, but it really isn’t.

Thus, the extremely annoying paradox of modern life that you have to do less to do more.  You either have to set things up so that you can focus exclusively on your most important task—which is likely to be impractical—or you have to allocate your resources so that you can focus serially on several important things.

There are things you can do to help make that easier—and some of them are sure to come up later in this blog—but they all tend to involve a few tasks in themselves.

Scheduling.  Prioritization.  Organization. Automation.

I’m sorry.

That’s just the way it is.

Stay tuned for more suggestions, but for now. . .just slow down.

The secret of all victory…

…lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

I’m not quite sure what Marcus Aurelius meant by that.  It sounds good, though, don’t you think?  I may wonder about that on some future Wondering Wednesday, but today is Thankful Thursday.   And so. . .

I am thankful today that technology has provided us with so many ways to help us organize the obvious and the non-obvious.  Maybe too many, but that’s a separate issue.

I have a lot of To Do lists.  And I keep looking for the perfect tool to manage them.  So, right now, a big item on my To Do lists is to merge them all into one master list.  I haven’t quite accomplished that yet, because each of the tools I use has different strengths, and picking one has been difficult.

It probably doesn’t matter which one I pick.  I really just need to choose one and use it with obsessive-compulsion.  I’ll work on that.

In the meantime, I thought you might want to take a look at some of the candidates and see if there’s anything here that would work for you.

The most recent find is Remember the Milk–an online To Do list that will email you reminders of tasks.   I haven’t done much experimentation with it, but it looks straightforward and relatively easy.  You have to sign up for a free account, however, and your list resides on their server.  I’m not quite sure I like that.  Just how private will it be?

On the other hand, I can carry a list in my pocket on a PDA or a smartphone.  I have to say that I don’t much care for the Task List in my Blackberry.  The one in my Palm Pilot is/was much more versatile.  Easier to view, to sort, to print, to reschedule tasks and to categorize them.  Plus, the Palm reminder alarms are more insistent than the Blackberry, and they stay on the screen.  The Blackberry lacks most of that functionality.  It will activate a brief alarm, but if you’re not near it at the time, the notification will have disappeared.  The next time you pick it up, you’ll have no idea.  It makes the Blackberry task list nearly worthless.

An organization tool that is a lot of fun–and takes significant disk space and memory to run–is The Personal Brain.  You can link all kinds of documents and ideas and websites together in multiple configurations.  This makes it possible to organize your tasks and thoughts in more than one way.  You can look at things according to project or according to which things you can accomplish at your computer or according to almost any other hierarchy you want to take the time to try.  On the downside, I haven’t figured out how to print lists of any kind, it’s a bit time-consuming to set it up, and it does take a lot of hardware resources to run smoothly.  But it’s fun  to see everything you’ve entered float around as you rearrange the connections, and it’s kind of cool to say “Let me just check my Brain.”

Another free program that I’ve found to be useful is Stickies.  It’s like having electronic sticky post-it type notes.  I used to list a lot of items in a sticky until my friend Carole mentioned that she creates one sticky per task so the notes are all over the monitor.  It’s very satisfying to close them as the tasks are completed.  The link above is for the PC version, but I’m fairly sure there’s something similar for Mac users.

All of those tools have some value.  And, of course, you can always use a pencil and paper or a Word document (outlines can be useful to organize a To Do list in Word).  The one tool to which I find myself returning most often is one I can’t really show you.  I developed it myself in Microsoft Access, and while it still needs work, it has many of the features I like.  It lets me organize by broad categories with increasing granularity through projects and sub-projects down to actual tasks.  I can set due dates and priorities and print various lists.  It doesn’t buzz at me, though, when something is looming.  Someday, I’ll see if I can’t add that to it.

Meanwhile, I think I should probably actually do something instead of spending all my time making lists.

But remind me sometime to talk about the progress bars we set up a few months ago.  They were an amazing productivity tool!

***

(Update for the email subscribers:  We’re still trying to figure out why the emails aren’t going out every day.  I am posting every day, and you should get two links the day after a skipped post.  You can always find it on the website if you’re wondering.  My continued apologies for the currently inexplicable.  I think it’s gremlins.)


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