I'm not the most organized person out there. Most of my organization is of the work kind, so while at the office I often start my morning writing a list of the things I most want to get done or the things I want done by the end of the week. Like many plans, this often doesn't survive past the first hour or two as other things come in that also need to be worked on, but it still helps.
In my personal life? Well, anything goes.
1. Naming conventions. I name my photos by a convention and I use folders on my computer all the time. This is a habit I picked up from when I worked at CS. There we had a name convention for everything that went something like type of project (I was a word processor, so they were things like L for Letter, etc.), section number, short title. So my photos get named in a similar way most of the time. 2010_icecream_03.jpg would be the third picture of ice cream from 2010, but normally I'm more specific than that. It really helps with remembering what my pictures were of.
2. Rotation. I used it religiously when I did cross-stitch as my major hobby, and I still have the charts I used for it lying around. Every year or so, I pull out the charts as I feel more overwhelmed by all of the projects I want to do and write all of my current projects onto the chart. I usually do this when I'm trying to work on both new projects and finish some UFOs. Guess what I'll be doing this year.
3. The grocery list. I wish I could help you there, but I just had to have my husband get skim milk yesterday, because I was so focused on buying everything for my ice cream project that I forgot to check if we were out of the non-ice cream milk. We don't have a car, so we do our groceries by delivery for the bulk of our items and by quick runs during the week for produce. I use both Roche Bros and Peapod, depending on the available specials. Both of these remember what your common purchases are, so you can spend less time looking in the aisles. At least one of these allows you to make a list that you can then use to start your grocery shopping.
4. Teux Deux. It's online and free and has an app if you want to take it with you. I found this via Not Martha last year.
5. Levengers. I blame one of my coworkers for this. A number of years back she showed me how she kept organized with the Circa notebooks, and because I love paper I was completely hooked. Cost and the fact that I have a ton of notebooks have kept me from just going in and becoming a paper buying machine. So, instead this year I have:
6. a Quo Vadis planner. Minister in fact. I was really early to Harvard Square sometime in December, so I went to all of my favorite shops: Beadworks, Bob Slate Stationers (their site need some updating), and Hidden Sweets. I couldn't tell you what I was there for today, but those were the shops I visited while I was waiting. I'm hoping to do real work on my Etsy store this year, so the planner is so I can keep track of what I want and need to do.
7. Blogging. It's scary, but between the blog and Ravelry, I can remember how long I've worked on something, what I used for starting materials, and a whole lot more. Unfortunately, this information comes at a price. Usually fear. Sometimes I wonder if my life is truly enriched by knowing that I've had this project on the needles for more than 3 years.
8. The birthday calendar. We bought ours from rockscissorpaper.com and love it. While it doesn't prevent us from not getting our friends and family something for their birthdays (something that can become prohibitively expensive), it does make us remember that my dad's birthday is coming up next week!
9. Dry erase calendar. We have one on our fridge that is similar to this one. It is pretty handy to know when my husband has an appointment, because he is pretty good about keeping it up to date.
10. Google Calendars. I have one for my normal stuff, which is under utilized, and a separate one for my running. My running calendar gets an annual boost every year when I add my half marathon training program in. I need to do that soon, so I don't get caught by the start of training (sometime in late February) for Boston Runs to Remember. May isn't that far away!
