AlbertLiang.net — Blog

So the evolution begins like this:

I had a planner, one that could chart out appointments and due dates for up to a year in advance, so I could jot down all the little meetings, appointments, and assignments I had due.  The thing was extremely handy so I wouldn’t accidentally plan a meeting in the middle of a midterm, or maybe forget I have a 17-page research paper due tomorrow so maybe “Thirsty Thursday” wouldn’t be a good idea.  Or, y’know, if it’s an anniversary coming up.  (No, I can’t remember that kind of stuff, either.  If I remember your birthday, feel special… you out-ranked a girlfriend’s anniversary [sorry xgfs if you're reading this, I'm a jerk, I know])

But the planner just wouldn’t do.  It couldn’t help me plan day by day what I would be doing, or heck hour to hour.  Sure, I can look at it and say “hey, cool, I have 2 tests at the end of this week.”  But that usually translates to “hey, cool, 3 days off, 1 day to cram, and 1 whole day of exams.”  Long term projects always (without fail) became eve-night projects.  Major test and quizzes were all multiple guess alike.  So thus came along “the worksheet” – a polar opposite solution to my long-term planner.  ”The worksheet” had a blank for every hour of my day.  If I could fill it in, I did it beforehand.  If I didn’t know what I was going to be doing, I filled it in posthumously so I could map out my distribution of hours in a day.  (Not surprisingly, the distribution was usually 85/5/10, waste time/work/think about work.)  That insanely detailed, overly-disciplined method lasted for about 2.2 worksheets.  About 0.2 worksheets into day 3, it just became too much.  Too much work to tell me what I already knew.

Next came the index cards.  The index cards was some tip I picked up from a CEO (online, not in person).  The trick was to make the next day’s index card BEFORE the day started.  Like a daily agenda an executive asssistant would make outlining the day’s to-dos.  The advantage of this system was to force myself to plan out my next day… to really think about how I was going to distribute my hours and plan my day.  It creates a short-term to-do list that is practical to accomplish within the timeframe.  But the index cards can’t plan long term.  And things that don’t get struck off on one day’s index card rolls into the next, until the majority of your index cards are old “to-dos” and very little new stuff.  (Plus it just gets darned depressing to look at.)  Index card lifespan: about 3 months.  By then, I had started missing far too many important, but forward-planned, meetings because I just couldn’t remember they were coming up.

On to “the notebook” –  a nondescript Mead composition book where I could scratch things down without chronological order.  It had a running to-do list that I could add on to at any moment, and plenty of blank space to jot down ideas that just hit you whenever and wherever.  And who cares if there’s no chronology, as long as you flip through the pages often enough.  And, hey, you can keep track of multiple to-do lists (say, personal, work, and relationship), so that was a bonus.  (I’m sorry, did I just say a to-do list for a relationship?  Yeah, I did.  Were you not paying attention when I said that bit about remembering anniversaries?)

And on to the final evolution.  The sheer innovation is going to blow everything else out of the water… I think this idea is probably patentable.  Post-it notes!  (Don’t even think about patenting it before me, buddy… I totally discovered this first.)  Meeting in 4 days?  Post-it note.  GREs in 1 month?  Post-it note.  Old roomie coming down to visit in 3 weeks?  Post-it note.  Words of inspiration?  Post-it note.  (The current one says “Regroup, reorganize, rethink!!!”  Actually, no, it only has “!!”, sorry.)  Sweet!  The post-it note jazz really does work.  Except for when it doesn’t.  (Don’t you hate that?)

Problem now is… I write everything down on my post-it notes (and The Notebook occassionally gets some action, too) that if I DON’T write it down, consider it never-gettin’-done.  Didn’t write down “do laundry”?  Well, I didn’t do laundry today.  (Speaking of which, I should go write that down for tomorrow… ask me tomorrow and I’ll probably have done the laundry.)  Sometimes, I feel like I need a to-do list for the to-dos I need to add to my list.  (Imagine taking a shower and mumbling to yourself, “Dang it, I forgot to mow the lawn… must remember to write that down when I get out.” <– that’s a to-do list for a to-do list…)

Same thing goes for these blog posts.  I write the titles of the blog posts before I write the entries, and save them as drafts.  (I know a lot of bloggers do this.)  It’s my blog-to-do list, so that one day I will go fill in the content, but at least I’ll never forget the idea.  And now that this post is down, I can strike off “write to-do blog entry” from my to-do list!