Ana’s first focus point is organization. She distinguishes this from planning, prioritizing, doing work, and adapting. There is plenty of overlap between those skills, as we’ll see.
Your brain can remember stuff. That’s pretty cool. Maybe you can remember all ~195 countries, or the intricacies of the Skript coding language. There are various ways to teach your brain to remember things better, and these are a fun diversion.
However, memory is also fallible. We forget stuff. Our memory is associative, meaning we can remember well when reminded. Folks sometimes think of memory like a filing cabinet. In a filing cabinet, you put something in a folder, and then put the folder in a drawer, hopefully with some semblance of organization for the contents. Let’s say we want to remember that Grandpa’s birthday is July 30th. Now you know that, so can you just tell your brain to “remember this, please” and put it in the “people’s birthdays” folder? That tends not to work.
Instead, we remember by creating associations. Maybe you can remember that Grandma’s birthday is New Year’s Eve, because we make a big deal about it in the middle of all the other holidays. And then you can tell your brain: Hey, Grandpa’s birthday is offset by half a year, minus one day. This is more likely to work, except maybe not the “minus one day” part, so then you remember it as July 31, which is perhaps close enough.
So that’s one of the strategies for remembering stuff, making associations. For many other things you might conceivable remember, this is both too much work, and unreliable.
Write Stuff Down
To remember better, don’t rely on your brain. Write stuff down, and conserve your brain power. Hey, look, I’m writing stuff down right now! Another benefit is the ability to share.
Even the act of writing things down helps establish memories, and I think handwriting, rather than typing, works even better. I ignore that last bit of advice, because handwriting is slow and messy. Instead, I write things down in various places:
- On pieces of paper: Things that I only need to remember temporarily, or things that I will later incorporate into a digital system.
- In Google Drive: Notes and spreadsheets, because it syncs across computers.
- Google Keep: shopping lists! important numbers, like passports. Things I wanted accessible on my phone, before I made Obsidian go there.)
- Obsidian: Where I’m currently writing. This is a current favorite, so I’ll write more below.
- Random digital notes near where I’ll need them again, such as comments or README files in code repositories. Here’s one, that I won’t need again until December.
As you start to write things down, the problem becomes how to find them again. There are all sorts of strategies on this, search for “Personal Knowledge Management” (PKM). I found my way to ”Building a Second Brain” by Tiago Forte, who has made a career out of this.
In particular, I’ve adopted his PARA Method, which you might go read about. The idea is to surface your notes and other resources in the context where you are likely to need them. Specifically, grouping things into four categories that create the acronym:
- Projects: what are you working on, for example writing “dad on executive function,” that will eventually finish.
- Areas: ongoing areas of responsibility. Some of mine are family finance, cooking, career, and health
- Resources: is for things you keep that you might want to refer to later
- Archives: is where you put completed projects, or other things you’re done with, that maybe you don’t want to just delete.
I have these folders in my Obsidian vault, and the same structure in Google Drive. For me, trying to centralize everything into one place is a losing battle, but if I’m thinking about planning Thanksgiving, then I only have a couple of places to look, and will find whatever I might have filed under Areas > Cooking.
To remember better, don’t rely on your brain. Write stuff down, and conserve your brain power. Do this regularly, and then your brain only has to remember where to look. The research suggests that, after a while, this actually helps free up space in your brain, as long as you grow to trust your system. Writing something down stops it from whirling around in your head. And less whirling (ruminating) may reduce stress, etc.
Stuff you Collect
I started with content you produce (notes, etc.) but you should also organize stuff you collect, such as handouts from your courses.
I highly recommend Obsidian, and so does the Internet. Hack your brain with Obsidian is a YouTuber’s take that resonated with me. As I wrote above, I’m writing these words in Obsidian. I don’t put much other than notes in Obsidian, but maybe I should. I used Google Drive first, and so just continue to put stuff — from Tax Papers (in Areas > Finance) to collected Memory Tips (in Resources > Learning) — there. You get to figure out what works for you, so try something, lest you end up with chaos.
Organize your Physical Space
When helping students, Ana starts with backpacks and binders. I am no longer a student, so I don’t have a lot of ideas here. But the internet has plenty of ideas for you to consider. Here’s a first search result, full of lovely tips. There are endless youtubes, tiktoks, and web pages where people write about getting organized, because it is a core life skill. Everyone needs this skill.
Rather than developing a nice system for physical organization, I try to get everything digital. Mom likes to have paper, so probably she has better ideas here. For physical papers, binders and folders and such are the way to go. On my desk, I have an “inbox” folder, and a “waiting” folder, but use these rarely. In fact now, the things in my “waiting” folder are waiting only for me to put them in the shredder.
I have a scanner, and try to get things into a digital format. Wirecutter recommends the phone app Adobe Scan which I find works well. Most of what I keep goes into the “resources” or “archive” category, and I rarely need to look for it.
Organize your tasks
To better decide what to do, it is useful to get a handle on the alternatives. What else do you need or want to do? Maybe you have a list, or a planner. We’ll talk more about this when I write about Planning, but today I’ll link a couple tools.
When you have one thing to do, you can just do it. When you have more than one, you might benefit from a list. Preferring digital, I use todoist. A popular alternative you could try is any.do There are many more. A colleague showed me he uses a Google Docs master to-do list.
The benefit here is scheduling, but we’ll talk more about that later.
Got stuff to do? Make a list!
Conclusion
There is no shortage of ideas on organization. Everybody needs this skill. Maybe you’re doing just fine, or maybe you’re a bit of a mess. Maybe you like to be disorganized, messy, late, forgetful, etc. Maybe you’re doing just fine as a ”hot mess“.
Here’s a quora: Signs of a disorganized person
At some point, you’ll need to be, or want to be, better organized, and so here’s a start at some ideas.
This is a weak conclusion, because getting organized is just the first step.