This is the second of five blog posts about organization and how I got some, against all expectations. They started life as an attempt to get my thoughts in order for a session on efficiency in bookselling that I’m presenting next week and got out of hand. I assure you nobody is more surprised than I am that I’m hosting a session about organization, but these posts explain how that happened. I think. (Though the session is specifically about efficiency and bookselling, these posts address efficiency and organization more broadly. I’ll post notes from the session later in the month.) The first post is here.

I wrote everything down.

That’s basically all I did.

There’s a lot more to the Getting Things Done method than that, most of it very helpful, but this was at the core of it all, for me. I wrote things down when I thought about them, and then when I realized I’d forgotten to do something, I took it as a reminder that I wasn’t writing everything down. Sometimes I sat down and tried to think of everything I had to do and had ever wanted to do, and wrote it all down. Unless it was something I could literally do at the second I thought of it, I wrote it down. Sometimes I wrote it down on scrap paper, sometimes I sent myself an email. Eventually I came to use Remember The Milk for everything. David Allen calls this “capturing,” and if you’ve ever felt like your brain is full of birds that would like to kill you, you will understand why.

An important side note here is capturing only works if you write down actual tasks, not big projects. For example, “send out recommendation newsletter” is not really a task, although I used to list it as one. It’s a project with about fifteen tasks, and it takes about three days in total. I had to start writing all those tasks down, otherwise I kept putting it off because it was bigger than everything else on my list, and it annoyed me that it was still at the top of my list for three days running. What’s the first task? First task is emailing the staff and asking them for recommendations, maybe a day or two before I start actually working on the newsletter. So I start there.

Capturing led me to see the basic patterns of my life in sharp relief. I already knew that much of my day-to-day life was repetitive tasks—whose isn’t—but having more and more of them written down allowed me to plan for them and get them done more efficiently. At this point, I have 150 or so regular reminders in my work list. Some things need to happen every Tuesday, some things the fifteenth of every month, some things every other day. I have no idea why I used to try and keep them all in my head.

Does that sound obvious? Of course it does. It’s the easiest, most obvious thing in the world. That hasn’t made it any less effective.

What you end up with, when you capture everything, is a list, or maybe several lists.  I personally keep one list for work that’s shared with my co-workers, one list for bills and personal tasks, one list for freelance work, one for the basketball league, one for things I need to buy. And a few secret lists. There are a lot of online services that will help you keep a list; Remember The Milk works for me for this because it syncs between my computer and my phone, and because it allows me to share lists with other people who are using it. I wanted very badly to be a person with a written list, but that did not work, so I had to give up my dreams of being an organizational Luddite.

Writing down what I need to do has worked because I can’t stand to have unfinished tasks on the list. It goes against my competitive nature to feel like the list is beating me. I think that works for most people. I’ve been pretty stunned by the things I’ve done just to get them off the list. Forget just using the attachments on the vacuum; we now clean the vacuum filter out every week at the store. Go on and guess how often it got cleaned out before.

Despite my need to win at things, though, lists didn’t work before because I didn’t put everything on the list. It doesn’t matter if I do everything on a list if not everything was there to begin with. In the past, I treated to-do lists as a space for important things, where the word important had no definition in particular. But that overlooked the fact that it’s the unimportant and repetitive tasks that, if not done when they need to be done, pull the rug out on my whole day. And those were the things that I couldn’t remember. (This sort of highly detailed list is especially helpful for a retail job; any task on the list comes to a halt when a customer needs help. But from what I hear from friends with office jobs, it’s not like those are havens of uninterrupted solitude and task-completion, either, so highly detailed lists are for everybody!)

I thought it might be overwhelming to see all the things I needed to do every day on the list, but in fact, it’s soothing not to rely on my battered memory. Most of the things on the list are unimportant and repetitive and easy to do, and it’s more satisfying to check them off than it could ever be to just remember them. Not that I ever did just remember them.

In order for the list to work, I have to look at it every day. Which was the other habit I had to build. I went the lazy habit-building route of setting my phone to remind me of the list every morning, which worked fine. For the list to work best, I also have to sit down and think about it sometimes. For my work lists, I always sit down on Saturday night after closing and look at what’s due in the next week and figure out when to do it. I shuffle things around based on the schedule. Though it all needs to get done, it doesn’t all need to get done on the same day. I feel okay postponing things because I also know what’s due tomorrow and the next day, and I know whether I’m overloading myself.

A related GTD tool that works really well for me is the two-minute rule: if it’s something that can be done in less than two minutes, you should just do it, instead of putting it on the list. Because by the time you write it down and then go back to it, you will have spent more time remembering to do it than actually doing it. This works especially well for email. There are a lot of emails I put off writing because they annoy me (hello, neverending stream of new literary journals) but if I don’t write them immediately it only worsens the problem, because then I am thinking about them more than I need to.

There are a lot of other things I did, and I can’t recommend Allen’s book Getting Things Done highly enough (nor can I thank the ABA enough for bringing him in to our conference). I would recommend reading his book or, if you get a chance, listening to him speak. But I’ve heard from a lot of people that they find the book overwhelming when reading it for the first time, and I can understand why. I definitely did not implement all the GTD stuff from the get-go (and I am pretty sure I still haven’t). So if you’re just looking for a place to start, I’d say write everything down and look at it every day. For me, that was the key lifestyle change that made everything start to work.

Tomorrow: What I Learned, and, Just What Is Organization, Anyway?