First of all, there's a tremendous irony that this post is appearing on the blog over a week later than I had originally intended. Enjoy the irony people, enjoy the irony.
I am a techy guy, this cannot be disputed. If there was an area in my life that I could some how convert to digital, I was all over it. Banking. Calendaring. Worship Team Planning. If they made a website that would do any of that, I would be all over it.
When I was in seminary, I used a program called "Things" to track my to-do items and keep me on track. This was a tremendous program, if only because it allowed me to schedule to-dos, thus every term I would sit down with the syllabus and input every assignment and paper at the beginning, so I wouldn't lose track of anything. To be sure, there's no way I would have survived seminary without it.
But then towards the end of my time there, a good friend told me he was getting in to bullet journaling. I also love journaling, and that happens to be one of the things that I never managed to go digital with, so I was intrigued. For those who are unfamiliar, here's a really rad video to explain what bullet journaling is:
I was concerned, in that this is so not digital. It relies on me not being a moron and leaving my notebook behind, or forgetting to enter something, or whatever. But man, I have been working with this system for a few weeks, and I absolutely love it! It's kept me super organized, and that in and of itself is pretty great, but there's more to this system to love. It's so customizable, it's ridiculous.
For example, I use a weekly outlook that he doesn't have. Basically I make a future log the same way he does, and then I split the last box into two for Saturday and Sunday. If I think of something I need to do later in the week, this is a good place to log things. I use the daily log the same way he does, but in between I journal some of my prayer thoughts, I write sermons, I doodle, I write songs. Instead of 18,000 folders on my laptop that may or may not contain what I'm looking for, everything is in the journal. And with the index, I know exactly where. It's a system that allows me to be a scatter brain, but still know where everything is and what's going on.
Maybe this doesn't work for everyone, but my goodness have I loved it. And again, I'm only two weeks in to being back to work, and the real busy season is coming with Veritas under a week away, but so far this has been the best way to keep my scattered thoughts collected.
How do you keep organized?