Just lately, I’ve lost a few tasks and deadlines through to the organisational system keeper (yes, a cricket reference). It’s upsetting on many levels, and leaves me worried about what else I’ve missed.

Getting the right tasks done at the right time relies on a system with several subsystems:

1. Calendar system: you know what calendars are for – anything with dates and times. Quite useful for turning up at the dentist on time, and ensuring your hair appointment doesn’t occur at the same time as the dentist.
2. Notes system: a place to put all the bits and pieces you want or need to remember. Like articles to read, shops to visit, and URLs to look up. Or plans for larger projects like kitchen renovations, gardening or travel plans.
3. Daily task system: getting the right actions done at the right time, that time being today, next week, or next year.

Liz Davenport, organiser, speaker and author of Order from Chaos, used what she called her “Air Traffic Controller;” a single book encompassing all those systems – a diary with two pages per day; notes on side and schedule on the other.

While I was working for someone else, I used an electronic diary, but I happily and successfully used a bullet journal for many years after that. Right up until I needed a somewhat more substantial calendar system – now I use a diary and a notebook.

Davenport wrote her book way back in 2001, so while her two page per day idea still has some merit, almost everything takes place digitally these days.

I recently read about Chelle Honiker, a full-time writer who also runs three businesses and takes care of the Author Nation programming. The heart of her organisational system is a series of Notion databases. All her data goes into a database (through a variety of methods like adding emails automatically to her to-do list), becoming anchors for a series of Zapier and make.com automations.

Much as I love the idea of that, it seems too complicated for my needs.

But, it changes my question a little bit.

What’s my problem?

As I mentioned, I’ve lost a few tasks and watched a few deadlines go by. I know watching deadlines pass is kind of traditional for writers, but I don’t like those kind of surprises much.

Davenport suggests your physical environment impacts your organisational system – most commonly post-it notes stuck on your computer screen, piles of paper on your desk, and boxes stacked about the place.

Guilty as charged.

The point is to know where all your stationery, files, and other necessary items are. Not just the physical, but the digital ones too.

I’ve been in my library now since about last Christmas, but I confess I just threw things in drawers and bookcases to get them out of the way, but I haven’t recreated a system for incoming items, nor do I know where anything lives.

Which changes the question again.

What’s the point of an organisational system?

The point of an organisational system is to have a place for everything, and to know that everything is, in fact, in that place.

To know when you pend a task (waiting for someone to come back to you), the task will come back into the system. Either at a date for you to follow up (deadline), or when they get back to you.

Plus, you’re not spinning your wheels on small tasks that go nowhere, but doing those that lead toward achieving your goals.

When pieces slip through the net and get lost, you not only lose momentum towards your goals, but you lose confidence in the system. You stop using it and thus lose even more confidence.

My tasks and deadlines are unlikely to be life and death, but I can’t keep it all in my brain box. Especially not post-stroke.

Regardless of whether I keep my analog system, or go digital, it seems I have some environmental issues to sort out.

My Library’s Environmental Issues

Happily, there’s only one room that needs to be sorted out, and that’s my library.

Which is a little embarrassing, because it is a bit of a Clever Girl’s (dog) breakfast.

I did pack in a hurry, and I also unpacked in a hurry, throwing most of the stuff randomly onto drawers and shelves so I could try to get back to work.

But it seems I need to make time for a big clean out.

To sort out the drawers and shelves, find homes for things, even if that turns out to be the recycle bin or a charity shop.

And because I’m complaining about deadlines passing me by, I’m going to tell you how it went next week.

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