Piggybacking on Mr. T’s Lifehacker-esque (a forgotten favorite site of mine) suggestion, I wanted to chip in a tip of my own.
My desk is a big mess. I was working on cleaning it off, and two thoughts collided to give me an idea.
- I take a lot of notes. I find an IP address in the log files, or I take a phone call and jot down a message for someone, or one of ten thousand other things that need scribbling down.
- I have a lot scrap paper. Drafts of resumes and letters, shipping forms for things I’m not returning, junk mail…
So I just took an old tip from work… I cut it into quarters, and now have a small pile of it on my desk. No more pieces of paper with 200 different things jotted down on it.
Sure, it’s simple, and hardly a “creative” idea. “Cut up scrap paper with nothing on the back?” But it’s strangely effective. And now I feel organized. (Okay, cleaning the desk might have played a bigger part in that…)
I’m actually a huge fan of Evernote; it lets you record all sorts of information and syncs it to an online “notebook library” of sorts. Clients for just about everything with a screen!
I’ve found that, as big of a geek as I am, sometimes you just can’t beat a slip of paper and a pen. I do a decent amount of note-taking in a plain ol’ text editor (Notepad or vi, depending on the OS), but there are plenty of times when using a keyboard just isn’t best.
Of course, not all of us have tablets. 😉