How many notes do you have on your desk right now? Ten? Twenty? Hun­dreds? Like many peo­ple, you prob­a­bly keep them on scraps of paper, or sticky notes stuck to your LCD, or in a pile on one side of your desk. That works just fine for some, sure, but orga­niz­ing your notes can be a real task, espe­cially when you have many top­ics on a sin­gle sheet of paper, or those sticky notes become…well, not so sticky. I’ve come up with my own method of keep­ing my notes and being able to feel pro­duc­tive that I thought I would share, as it has been absolutely fantastic.

It all started when I received a cou­ple of those lit­tle pro­mo­tional “block pads” – you know, the thick square ones that aren’t sticky – from my father. I’m sure every­one has one or two of those lying around in a drawer or box some­where, still wrapped its plas­tic. Well, it’s time to take it out, unwrap it, and put it to use.

For every indi­vid­ual topic, every project, and every group of ideas, rip off a new sheet from the pad and write it down. Give the note a header that rep­re­sents the topic to which it per­tains. Head­ers are optional, but helps sig­nif­i­cantly if the note will be around a while; for very tem­po­rary notes (a list or note that will be com­pleted or tossed in the next 24–48 hours), you can likely skip the header. Now, write down what­ever it is you need to keep track of: a to-do list for a project, a cou­ple thoughts that need to not be for­got­ten. Always, always use a list for­mat. It doesn’t have to be neat, and it can be down­right messy, but using bul­let points is impor­tant as it makes the infor­ma­tion more quickly “scannable.”

These note “squares” are also great for get­ting quick sketches down to get a gen­eral idea of a design or lay­out. You don’t need a whole sheet of paper for some­thing like that; these notes will help you stay in the right direc­tion, while allow­ing for some cre­ative flex­i­bil­ity since they won’t be extremely detailed.

As your set of notes grows, keep them orga­nized. I do this by lay­ing them out in a grid for­mat on my desk, with the most impor­tant clos­est to me, and the less impor­tant fur­ther away. This allows me to find the infor­ma­tion I’m look­ing for at a glance. Never pile active notes! You can, of course, pile old notes into an “archive” that sits else­where, but your active notes should always be visible.

As you com­plete items on your var­i­ous todo lists, cross them off. Once a list is done, throw it out. If the note is a set of thoughts, but they are no longer per­ti­nent, archive it…you never know when you might need to ref­er­ence those notes again, or use them as inspi­ra­tion later.

What’s great about this tech­nique, besides keep­ing your thoughts and lists very well orga­nized and acces­si­ble, is that it is down­right con­ve­nient. Need to take a note with you? Stick it in your pocket. Need to take 20 notes with you? Still fits in your pocket. You can’t do that with full-sized sheets of paper as eas­ily, and sticky notes lose their stick­i­ness when you attempt that. On top of that, you can save a lot of paper, since you’re only using small sheets, and an old note can be reused by just flip­ping it over.

There are only one or two real down­sides to this method. Firstly, it tends to take up a bunch of desk space. This hasn’t been a prob­lem for me, as the only things I use my desk for are the notes and my com­puter; if you need to actu­ally work on your desk as well as man­age these notes, I’d sug­gest split­ting your desk space in half and lim­it­ing the notes to one section.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the notes tend to move around eas­ily, which is both an advan­tage and dis­ad­van­tage. On the neg­a­tive side, if you acci­den­tally knock your notes, they’ll get a lit­tle messy; this is eas­ily fixed with 20 sec­onds of reor­ga­ni­za­tion. The pos­i­tive, which far out­weighs the neg­a­tive, is that the notes can be repri­or­i­tized in an instant. If one note becomes less impor­tant than another, you just slide them around and swap places.

I hope some of you will give this a try. It’s really increased my orga­ni­za­tion and helped me keep my thoughts straight, and it might just do that for you too.

Tags: lists, notes, organization, productivity

Posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 5:21 pm, under productivity.

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