Write Shit Down

1. Go-Go Gadget

The world demands a certain amount of organization. When you can’t juggle all your commitments, people notice. It’s me. I’m people. Broken promises are one of my pet peeves, when someone says they will follow up on something and never does, I lose a degree of respect for that person. Thus, in my pursuit of not being a hypocritical douche canoe, I work really hard on trying to NOT be that guy.

Part of my strategy for this, is to not promise any firm deadlines. That makes room in my schedule to do the few things that have a hard deadline, with room to spare for the inevitable setbacks that doing anything of actual value is prone to engender. The other part of the strategy is the tricky part. See I tend to be a chaotic mess. I bounce around a lot, interesting problems are wonderful distractions.

How then, does an aspiring organizedman stay on track? I write shit down. Historically the results of this are mixed. The idea is sound, why rely on fallible memory when you can just record the information somewhere. And therein is exactly the problem. Somewhere.

The to-do app is practically a meme at this point in the programming world. Every single tutorial wants to help you build a to-do app in various languages and using various technologies. How ironic that with all of that effort going in to creating these apps, there aren’t any that I actually want to use.

On the one hand, many of them want me to put my notes and to-dos in the butt cloud, and to pay them eternally for the privilege. Heaven forbid I not be able to access these to-dos from at least six disparate devices after all. “But Mongoose, there are lots of them, just pick one that’s all local/offline” I hear you shout at your monitor.

And you’re not wrong, I hear very nice things about Obsidian. I USE Obsidian on mobile in its most basic form, a text box to type things in. It’s fine. I’d kinda rather self-host it if I wanted to sync, which wasn’t an option last time I checked. But I’d probably still use it, except there’s another problem. There are two classes of to-do. There are the aforementioned time-sensitive ones, and there are ones that belong in the bucket of “gosh I should really do these things, but order of operation and timeframe aren’t important.”

2. Class Warfare

For the latter, there’s a major problem. If I write them down in an app somewhere, they live there until I remember to go look at that app again. So, things slip through the cracks. As soon as I write down the thing and close the app, it’s gone. It has been recorded and therefore my brain is allowed to let it go. And it will.

Obviously we should then turn on some sort of notifications, or build some sort of habit, right? Here’s the other problem. I hate notifications. If you’re gonna send me a notification it better be something that needs tending to right meow.

So now we need to track two discrete types of things. One that makes annoying alerts go off because it’s time-sensitive, and another that somehow doesn’t send those notifications but also doesn’t disappear from my awareness of the world instantly. What do?

I’m a futureman! I genuinely believe in the ability of tech solutions¹ to be helpful to humans and make our lives better. I need you to understand that before I say the next thing, because it’s gonna sound crazy.

Write shit down.

On paper.

With a pen.

That’s it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Ok fine, I’ll elaborate. Get yourself some of those little yellow notepads your parents always had. You should probably also buy some pens, yours are probably all dried out. Why yes, I DO know from experience. This is gonna cost you like $5, it’s ok. Now, write shit down on that paper.

That’s kinda it. I’ve heard of people making strict rules around this process. Rules like “every day gets a new page, and anything left undone from the day before gets evaluated for addition to today’s page or just being ignored.” These are probably good rules, and I do that sometimes, I just don’t worry about the day. Whenever I run out of page is usually a good time. I’m not big on rules, even my own. I do try to keep it to one page as a loose rule, just to avoid the feeling of drowning in tasks.

The thing about the notepad is that it always exists. It occupies space in the world. If it lives on my desk it’s especially effective. There’s not a lot of color there either, so it stands out. I don’t have to remember to open anything, it’s open and there are the items.

3. What About Bob?

I’m not saying that you should go analog for everything.² I’m a big fan of digital books when I’m going to read them straight through,³ and I’m not planning on changing that. My grocery shopping list still goes in Obsidian, because the prompt for opening the app at that point is asking myself “what the hell did I need from here again?”

If you’re dancing around dying to ask about those time sensitive tasks you can relax. Those get calendar appointments. With lots of reminders. That way I can visually see how busy I am as I’m scheduling and get a feel for how much failure I’m setting myself up for. But also I can set the “you need to prepare for this thing” reminder, and another for 15 minutes later to remind myself that I’m serious and if I’ve been sidetracked by something that I really do need to start that prep.

There’s another secret benefit to this method. Crossing tasks off the list is really, really, satisfying. Sometimes if I do something reasonably large I go write it down partway through. I find it helpful to give myself a reminder that I did the big thing when I’m looking back over the list. It also gives me something to cross off the list.

All of this started as a little bit of an experiment because I was finding that little things were slipping through the cracks as I became busier running my streaming/content creation endeavors. It’s been a few months and I still find it to be extremely helpful, so maybe you should add a notepad and pen to your shopping list and give it a try too.

It’s not going to magically solve all your problems, no gadget will. Not even one as mighty and futuristic as a notepad. But maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that it helps you to be a little bit more organized. Tag me on social media if you try this, or if you already do this. I’m curious how prevalent it is in this day and age. Maybe I’m the one behind the times here?