Organizing your mind- advice?

[avad]

Hey all. serious question.
I'm wondering if anyone has some advice on how they are best able to organize daily, short and longterm goals and contact management.
Specifically I'm interested in personal techniques...from to do lists on paper or emails to self to computer programs, mindmaps, rolodexes, binders...what helps you to SEE and REMEMBER what needs to be done daily, monthly and in the bigger picture?

Also how about how you organize business cards you collect from people you meet and are supposed to keep in contact with...and how to possibly integrate them into a more efficient yet still visual contact database etc...

thanks so much!
(and for those who share my question and current longing for organization- really good tips and resources are being compiled in the comments/replies- worth a look!!)

Comments

[sendao.livejournal.com]

I use google's calendar for scheduled events.
Notepad for everything else.

Most of the time I use notepad in a mindmap format... just writing it all down...

As for contacts... there are a variety of solutions, but I just keep a contacts.txt file... as I know that I will be able to access it whether I am online or offline, travelling, etc.

My methods are very simple but they work well... an outline format is great because it lets you break goals down into groups, then establish more detail on what needs to happen for each goal etc.

There's also a very useful tool in MS Office for managing schedules, you can for instance set events to be reliant on each other, and they automatically resort themselves if some event goes overdue etc.

Just a few ideas... I am not visual though.. I am textual, so good luck :) try google! It has a lot of tricks.

[avad.livejournal.com]

thanks so much sendao:)curious on a few details: do you jot any notes on how you met this person or anything on the txt file? Because I'm so visual, the actual card tends to act as a mnemonic trigger for the context in which I met the person and perhaps Why we exchanged info...but I think I have to start taking some notes and jotting them in with contact list. I'd love to find a way to 'tag' contacts with keywords so that groupings of related people cluster visibly if I am looking towards a certain project...

I love outline format as well for goals..wiki-ish....have to utilize it better to see the micro and macro more clearly...I seem to get stuck in the middle/general.
xo

[sendao.livejournal.com]

Well I let my mind do most of the management; I am honestly a bit afraid of controlling my own mind (or destiny). So no... I do not record details of meetings and etc... although it'd be cool hehe

tags and clouds... such wonderful associative tools. *nods* Well I have a mindmapping tool that runs in secondlife *grins* that is visual...

hmm, stuck in the middle... well I don't know what the middle is *laughs* My goals are almost always programming things... so it does not take me long to break the goal into pieces and then describe those pieces rigorously. Looks like someone else has some great ideas as to tools you can use, though.

I think the key part is actually doing it, and keeping up with it. That is what I have always had a problem with, with my various information management attempts. Because of that I settle on the simple and easy solution (notepads)

[sendao.livejournal.com]

also, nothing wrong with pencil and paper

[sendao.livejournal.com]

Hey Dar... you got me thinking about this again, and now to organize my daily and weekly tasks, I'm using a single spreadsheet... it has multiple pages; one for each week ("short term goals"), one for goals for the year, one with larger guiding directions... the year and larger guiding directions help to build the weekly/daily views, and those in turn help me keep track of how quickly things are going and whether or not I can allocate myself free time. Neat!

I'm using openoffice.org Calc, as I can't afford microsoft's crapware and don't like it anyway. :)

[avad.livejournal.com]

hey sendao:)
I'm still having some trouble...mostly because there are great tools but once on the computer I'm toooo easily distracted by all the other things I want to 'check' or read. Need to figure out better ways to organize off the computer to actually get the myriad things I need done that are not computer related...in the studio for example.trying to make better to do lists as a start..
loveyou,D