Category: Productivity

Today, in between researching the legal and tax issues that go along with fiscal sponsorship (long story), I switched productivity software. I was using Next Action, I am now using Remember the Milk.

A lot of people will tell you not to do this, since it’s just a fancy way of wasting time. But it was a long time coming, and here’s my reasoning. Next Action, while being very small and convenient on one computer, isn’t at all mobile, since it runs purely off Google Gears based on your own computer. That worked for a long time for me, but lately I’ve needed something that will follow me around, since I’m having to accomplish more in more places. Clearly, a piece of paper is the simplest of all, but if I have to do the same thing at the same time each week, then a computer will do the boring work of writing it down for me.

I’m excited about Remember the Milk because while it is web based, it also runs off Google Gears for off-line access. It also has a variety of reminder systems, including SMS, which would be incredibly useful for me. I think it will be robust enough to do what I want but not onerous to set up. So there’s some productive productivity.

P.S. I did do my research before messing with productivity software, so in the end the most important thing for today did get done!

I’ve mentioned before that I have tendencies towards being a productivity hobbyist, but besides using some to-do list software and cultivating certain habits, I haven’t done that much about it. Yesterday I spent some money on this hobby by making a tickler file. A tickler file is an old-fashioned way of remembering to do things on a certain day, and in its basic form consists of 43 manila folders. Why 43? 12 for the months, and 31 for the days of the month. The picture (if I can get it online) shows what this looks like. You can file things for a certain day a  month ahead, or put things in the months folder if you haven’t gotten to that month yet.

This seems to work well for me so far, based on the fact that my desk was yesterday covered in papers and notes, and today is empty. I will worry about each piece of paper on the day that I find it in the folder, and only then. It’s a nice feeling, though I may take it too far. For instance, today I got a letter in the mail telling me how great it would be to join some other librarians on a trip to South Africa later this year, for an estimated $6,000. They wanted to know by February 17th at the latest if I was planning to go, and I was about to file this in my folder for February 16th, when I remembered that I don’t actually have $6,000 to take a trip to South Africa (or, I mean, anywhere….) So I filed it in the blue plastic file instead. It’s probably best not to create a situation where I constantly taunt myself from the future.

If this sounds like something that you too would like to create, the instructions that I used are here. I would skip the binder clips, though, since it’s just more stuff to do, and a grown up person should be able to figure out the day of the week without a binder clip’s help.