21st century organization

I have to confess that until recently I was pretty out-dated in the organization of my private/professional life. I used a Filofax for Calendar and Todo-List and that was it. Forgotten birthdays, late fees for books, last minute working on important stuff – that all happened way to often. What was the problem? I had my Filofax with me most of the time, but I didn’t look into it often enough. I’ve just never made it a habit.

I’m also reading feeds (RSS) and other news very often. I used Feedreader for almost two years. It was working fine as long as I used it at home. But as the one at home doesn’t sync with the one at work, I had problems knowing what to read. Unread news just pilled up and I almost gave up sometimes. When I switched to a Mac at work, I couldn’t even use it any more, so it was time for change. Frankly, I’m not a guy who changes his working environment very often. Probably because I’m not an “Innovator”, but an “Early Adopter/Early Majority” (Diffusion of Innovation). I need to be convinced, that the new thing is better, not that it’s just new. But it was about time I use the opportunities of web-based organizing in my favour.

So the first problem was News-Feeds. A web-based Feedreader would be a solution. I checked out Bloglines, but I didn’t like their reading interface very much. So I tried Google Reader. Much better: slick, minimalistic and a nice way of reading post by just scrolling down. So the problem of feed reading was solved. After using it for a while, I discovered a widget for the Google Personalized Homepage (named iGoogle now).

I had used iGoogle for a while as a startup page at work, showing me the weather and some daily quotes, but not much more. I’ve never thought of using it for more. But a Google Reader widget (a widget is a little page which can be integrated into another web page like iGoogle) changed my mind. Now I could have a browser start page at home and work which would show me my unread news and weather. Now I got interested.

Several days later I realized that I forgot another birthday. Damn you Filofax! Ok, it kinda was my fault, tough. 😉 So I took another step forward in realizing that I need a calendar that I really look into every single day. I did check out Google Calendar, mainly because there already was a widget for iGoogle. It is really nice. I used Ical at work, but I found Google Calendar as nice and easy to use and it’s accessible from everywhere. Not to forget it appears on my start-up page so I have to look at it. Goodbye Filofax!

Next thing which was very important to me was a proper todo-list. Google had some build in widgets for that, but they didn’t satisfy me at all. I need for example priorities. A short search time later I stumbled upon Remember the Milk. It was perfect: priorities, tags, due dates and everything very simple and minimalistic (love that). And of course it had a widget for iGoogle.

The last important thing was blurriness. I mean the kind of little notes about stuff that you always scribble down, always forget and always never use again despite being very useful information. I first used Apple Stickies for that. Nice little notes, but bound to my work mac. Web-based was still the keyword. So came Google Notebook. After a while I realized that it wasn’t really that good. The notes had no titles, the iGoogle widget was hard to navigate. There must be something better out there. So I found Stikkit. These guys did a great job of taking stickies into the 21st century. According to what you type the stikkit realizes if it’s a contact, a check list or an apointment. On the fly. No clicking or selecting from drop downs. Just typing in a list is almost addictive. So I switched.

Now I had a feedreader, a calendar, a todo-list and notes – everything web-based and on my browsers start page. Haven’t forgotten a single birthday since and I finally arrived in the 21st century. 😉