Thing 14: Personal Information Management

I like task lists and workflows and organizing my work, and have spent years looking for the perfect personal information management system.  I have experimented with dozens of different ones but without success.  The ones I tried out didn't fit the type of work that I was doing, or the way I preferred to organize my stuff, or the kind of stuff I was trying to organize.  Then there were those that were so complicated to use that I would waste hours trying to get a handle on what I was supposed to do - hardly a recipe for saving time.  I also found that many of these tools are quite addictive.  You spend ages organizing, filing, planning and making notes, and come back from it thinking you have made huge progress when in fact all you've managed to do is procrastinate.  When I looked at Evernote, I felt that - for me at least - this was one of those tools.   It's actually quite similar in its general concept to OneNote which comes with Microsoft Office and which (needless to say!) I have tried and failed to feel comfortable with.  There is in fact only one tool that has worked for me without fail, and that is the good old one-day-to-a-page appointment diary coupled with a pen.  It's portable, reliable, simple to use, easy to navigate and doesn't require a battery.

I am also an awful hoarder of information.  I save press cuttings and recipes, and copy things from books for reading later on.  I have umpteen folders in my filing cabinet for all these different items and the only time I open any of them is when I shove in more stuff.  Not once have I opened them to take out something to read.  Once it goes into the filing cabinet, I forget all about it and never, ever look at it again.  Nowadays, if something interests me I read it there and then, and then discard it, unless I find it so useful that it merits keeping.  If it's an online thing, I save it under Favourites or bookmark it, depending on the browser I'm using.  I had a look at Feedly but I'm afraid I would have no use for this tool.  The same thing would happen as with the folders in my filing cabinet.  I would keep storing things for later reading and never read a thing.  And anyway, I don't obsessively follow news feeds - in fact the only RSS feed I have on my PC is for BBC World News.  We live in an age of information overload and I have enough going on in my life without taxing my brain with a million other things happening around me.  If it is sufficiently important, it will eventually find me, whether I go looking for it or not.

Remember the Milk is like a digital task list and seems like a fun application, but unless you actually act on the reminder it won't get you far.  And there's the rub.  Having read through this Thing and experimented with various tools it dawned on me why they don't work for me.  My life isn't all that complicated.  I don't need half a dozen tools to set tasks and store information and remind me of what I need to do when and where and why.  I can handle all that.  My problem is with getting up and actually doing it.  Instead of taking action on all my notes and task lists and reminders I waste time waiting for inspiration, motivation, the right moment, or the right frame of mind.  Now, if someone invented a tool for generating that, I'd be the first in the queue to use it!  In the  meantime, I think I'll just stick with my appointment diary.

Ah, the good old days of simple technology...

Image sources:

Image 1: Pixabay, Creative Commons License CC0.
Image 2: GTDrawings Blog, 25 January 2006.
Image 3: Busyman's Magazine, July-December 1906, p. i.