Organised and happy: An opinionated guide to being organised
This is a brain dump of ideas. Possibly the start of a further expansion or maybe it will just die here on Medium.
Preface
I don’t trust my brain; this makes me organise my life in a way that I don’t need to rely on him (my brain) completely. The way in which I keep myself, and the things around me, organised helps me to easily get things done and, as a result, keeps me happy.
The “tricks” that I employ aren’t complex, nor are they difficult to maintain. Which leaves me to wonder why so many people around me live their lives in a chaotic and disorganised manner; leading to increased anxiety, tension at work, and frustration for others.
As you can probably tell, I’m opinionated. And what better option do I have than to put my thoughts down with the hopes of imparting some practical, and somewhat simple, advice on how to be organised and happy.
A few notes before we start
My advice is not always best
Many self-help or self-improvement books and articles frame their advice as fact. Leading you to believe that by following the proposed steps will lead to a happier life, financial freedom, better sex, or tighter abs.
It is unfortunate that anyone can give advice and build up a following. It is even more unfortunate, and no matter how hard I’ve tried, I also fit into this category of “anyone”. Knowing this, you should take my advice with a heavy helping of scepticism; what I advise may need to be modified to suit your personality and needs or it just might not be suitable for you.
I don’t receive any pleasure from causing distress in others, so please note this: what works for me, or anyone else for that matter, is not a golden rule or silver bullet.
Do what works for you
To carry on from the previous point; there is no value is suffering through processes and tasks if they don’t work for you. What you do should fit into your character, routine, and goals. If it’s not working for you then adjust it or stop doing it.
With that being said, you should approach the advice being given with an open mind and some flexibility with your attitude. Some parts might be easy to adopt and others might require more personal investment, but each should be given some thought and experimentation before being pushed aside as nonsense or time wasting activities. I’ve found that some of my most effective solutions evolved from skeptically trying ideas I assumed were foolish at the time.
But do know when it’s time to stop pushing the boulder up the hill.
I’m obsessed and it’s ok if you are not
If I were in charge, this would be gospel. But I am only in charge of myself and in control of what I can do. If you’re happy with how you accomplishing your tasks and organising your life, then that’s great and if you don’t feel the need for any change then don’t. If it’s not harming your work, relationships, or mental stability then you do you.
Change what you want, where you want, when you want, and how you want.
Nothing is sponsored
I wrote this out as an experiment for myself, without the initial intention of presenting it to the public. I don’t like the idea of tainting my recommendations with affiliate links or paid promotions.
All of my recommendations come from personal experience and a want to support the people who created the wonderful products that I use.
Keeping your inbox at zero
Your inbox is boring and really shouldn’t be my opening when there are thousand of articles that share the same thoughts. But you inbox is one of the most important tools when working with others; getting this right takes a load off your shoulders and reduces frustration for others.
⚠️ People not replying to, or “missing” emails, is a huge thorn in my side and something I want to address.
Many articles will tell you that a Zero Inbox — ending your day with zero emails in your inbox — is the only way to liver, that it’s life change, and essential for your “hustle”. When I first read about Zero Inbox I was smitten, this was a genius idea that I needed to implement now and quickly. “Of course life would be easier if I didn’t have a mountain of emails in my inbox at all times” I thought. And with that thought fresh in my mind I started my quest for a better life.
Over time I realised that although having a clean inbox is a great achievement and something useful, it shouldn’t be the rule to live by. I started adjust the idea to better suit me and how I work.
I categorise my emails as having one of four states: Unread, Not yet actioned, Actioned and filed, and Deleted.
Unread
An email sitting in my inbox that I have not yet read.
Not yet actioned
An email sitting in my inbox that I have read but I am yet to reply to it or action (i.e. do something in relation to the contents of that email). With a clean inbox it’s easier to quickly see what still needs to be actioned or replied to. These serve as a reminder that I need to do something.
Actioned and filed
An email that has been actioned (e.g. I’ve replied to it or it didn’t require a response) and I have moved it to one of the many folders I have in my email client.
For me, this means that I have done my job and the email is no longer my responsibility. By that I mean either the other person is responsible for responding or the email chain has finished.
⚠️ If I’m expecting a response from the other person/s and it’s important for me to remember, I might set a reminder to check up on it in a few days (more on this later).
Deleted
An email that has been deleted from my inbox and now resides in the trash of my email client.
What to do with an overflowing inbox
If you’re looking at your inbox thinking that clearing up those thousands of emails is an impossible task then I have some encouraging words for you: Not really, and it’s only going to take a few steps.
There are two ways to manage your emails, either by filing them neatly into organised folders or dumping them into a single archive and relying on your email client’s search function.
Depending on which method you want to use to manage your emails, whether you’re a filer like me or a searcher like an animal, you’re going to want to do one of two things first.
The filer’s first step
If you’re a filer, decide on a folder structure and create the base of that structure. Mine is organised with a folder containing subfolders for clients and additional subfolders for projects, a folder for finances with subfolders for the different areas (e.g. tax return, VAT, accountant, receipts, etc.), a folder for travel, and a variety of other folders for different areas of my life.
Once you’ve created the folders, search for correspondences that would fit into each folder. Move all the results of your searches to the appropriate folders and continue doing so until you can’t organise any further. There’s no need to be too precise in this step. It’s just a matter of adding some form of organisation to the bulk of it.
General organisation
From here on, the steps are the same for both filers and searchers.
Create three folders: Newsletters, Important, and Archive. These three folders will hold all your other emails if you’re a filer and all your emails if you’re a searcher.
Getting rid of all newsletters
Search for “Unsubscribe” or “Opt-out” and select all emails in the results. Move these to your Newsletters folder. Filing them ensures that nothing that might be of importance gets deleted.
If you’d like to take this a step further you can search for a particular sender, whose emails you definitely don’t need, and just delete all the results.
⚠️ It takes no time to unsubscribe from a newsletter and saves you the tedium of repetitively receiving emails from them. Run through your emails and unsubscribe from the ones you no longer need, or use a service like Unroll.me to bulk unsubscribe.
💡 When signing up for a newsletter, save your first name as the name of the company you’re signing up to. If the company sells your data you’ll know.
Moving all emails to Archive
Search for emails older than ten days and move them to your Archive folder. If you haven’t replied to that email then it is unlikely that you ever will. Don’t worry about the person/s on the other end of that email exchange, they already know you’re not going to reply and they’ve probably already send you the “polite reminder” email.
Organising your recent emails
I’m hoping that you’ve got your inbox down to less than 300, if not…wow.
It’s now time to organise the remaining emails. Skim through these emails and, if you don’t need to reply to that email or action it in any way, move it to the appropriate folder (if you’re a filer) or the Archive folder (if you’re a searcher).
Actioning your remaining emails
There should, hopefully, only be a handful of emails remaining. These emails should be the ones that require action, such as a response. Go through each email, reply or action it, and then move it to the appropriate, or Archive, folder.
Moving forward
Not letting your inbox overflow is important unless you want to repeat this process monthly. Think of each email as having one of the four statuses I mentioned and either leave it in your inbox to be actioned, file it, or delete it.
💡 Getting to know your mail client’s keyboard shortcuts helps with quickly organising your emails once you’re done with reading them.
Organising and tracking your tasks
To steal and paraphrase words from David Allen, the creator of the time management method called “Getting Things Done”; when trying to manage all of our obligations in our heads, we create “open loops” which make us anxious and reduces our ability to think effectively. By offloading your task management you can focus more fully on what you should actually be doing instead of worrying about everything else you need to do.
To-Do lists can greatly divide people into two camps — seeing them either as useful tools for getting things done or as managerial processes that stifle productivity. Over the years I’ve migrated between those two camps several times. Starting off enthusiastic about a new solution and then slowly tiring and becoming frustrated by one of the many I’ve tried — pen and paper, Apple Notes, Trello, specialised apps. These solutions didn’t last long for me; being dropped because they required more time managing the lists than ticking items off them.
I was introduced to TickTick as a happy accident while doing research for a project. Not thinking much of it, or anything at all, I tried it out for a few days as I had been in between options at the time. At first, I didn’t see anything inherently special about it; tasks can be created, organised, and marked as done. These are essential parts of any To-Do solution.
The difference with this solution was that the process or creating and managing tasks was seamless; I didn’t find myself running through my lists trying to figure out what I needed to do, I wasn’t wasting time managing it, and I didn’t have to take myself out of the context of what I was doing when I needed to create a reminder for something.
The key feature, that surprisingly few applications had come with at the time, was a quick add bar — a bar that appears on screen when triggered by a keyboard shortcut (on my Mac it is CTRL + Z). The quick add bar allows you to create a task from anywhere in your computer, without having to navigate to the TickTick application. This meant that I was no longer task switching and losing concentration from the work I was actually doing (more on this in Disabling notifications).
This quick add bar, paired with the ease of separating tasks into different lists, sharing those lists, adding date reminders, repeating tasks, and a habit tracker, is the reason TickTick has continued to be my To-Do list solution for over two years.
How I use TickTick
I started using TickTick quite differently to how I use it now. Maybe I felt that I would switch to a different solution once I got bored with this one. I was happily wrong. I now use it to remind me of all my tasks; if it’s not in TickTick then it likely won’t get done.
Separate lists
Separate lists are worthwhile if you want to track different areas of your life (e.g. work, personal, travel) or if you want to have a shared list with someone (e.g. a house list with the wife).
Adding tags
Tags are typically used for grouping, but if your tasks list isn’t of a monstrous scale or shared with a large group of people, then tags might not be that useful. I use the following three tags for context and to more easily reference my tasks: Reminder, Response, and Quick.
Reminder: Weekly, monthly or yearly repeating tasks, such as sending monthly bank statements to my accountant or notice that my yearly home insurance needs to be paid. It’s not important to add context to these but I’ve found that it makes it easier to filter them when looking for specific repeating tasks.
Response: If I’m waiting on a response from someone I’ll create a tasks to remind myself about it. These tasks can’t be actioned, other than sending the passive aggressive ”Just checking in to see if you’ve received my last email” email. These tasks help me project manage myself and other people I’m working with.
Quick: It’s sometimes nice to see easy tasks in your list to tick off when you’re not feeling too productive and need a quick win to get you going.
Prioritising tasks
Although TickTick has a priority flag for tasks, I don’t use it. If the task is due for today then it gets completed today or moved to a future date.
Structuring the task
Having a bit of structure for your tasks makes it easier to create them and skim through the list. TickTick has smart text parsing so that you can easily add a task to a list (^ to bring up your lists), add a tag (# to bring up your tags), define a date (writing the date and time), and set a priority (! to bring up the priority options) in the quick add bar.
I structure my tasks with the client or project name, followed by a colon, a short description of the task, date, optional list and optional tag.
Example: Client name: Send initial invoice ^goat tomorrow 2pm #quickExample: Project name: Setup project in Notion 15th Aug 9am ^goatExample: Transfer money for home insurance (€xxx) Yearly 2nd September #reminder
If the task is more complex, has sub tasks, or requires more information, I’ll add a further description in the richer description field (shortcut: hit tab when in the quick add bar).
Tracking your habits
I love collecting data. Being able to see a history of something and looking at trends can make me giddy. TickTick has a habit tracker, with time sensitive reminders. I currently track, or try to track, four habits — did I wake up early (arbitrary based on the day), did I do exercise today, did I avoid biting my nails today (don’t judge me), and was I productive today (arbitrary based on the day).
Not all habits need to be tracked on a daily basis. Some, such as waking up early are only tracked during weekdays and exercising should be achieved at least three times a week.
It’s a real boost to see your habit working out.
And a real ball ache to see your habit fail.
Planning your day and week
Knowing what I have in store for my day and the rest of the week is great. I hate sitting at my desk trying to remember the list of jobs I have to do and figuring out what to prioritise. Running my own business, this also helps me know when I should stop for the day: when all my tasks are completed and not just when 6pm comes round.
I’ll admit that my process is a bit complex and likely won’t work for others. This is due to the nature of my work, the tools that I use, and the years of experimenting with what works for me. The projects I work on also tend to be short one month projects that have very clear steps or year long projects that move along as the work gets done. This means that my tasks aren’t overly complex and they follow very similar processes each time. But it might be helpful to describe it.
Macro level tasks
When a new project starts, I define the types of tasks that are required for it. This is done in Notion (another incredible tool for management and documentation). These would be all-encompassing tasks such as briefing, design, build, testing. The tasks have a date range for them, this tells me when they will be started, how long they might take, and when they should be completed by (similar to a Gantt chart).
That project is planned from start to finish, and will hopefully be kept on track.
Micro level tasks
My week starts by defining all the tasks required for the week in TickTick. This is done by going through the macro level tasks in Notion and breaking them down into smaller, more achievable tasks. These tasks shouldn’t span more than a few hours, or at most an entire day.
This usually doesn’t take me more than 10 minutes, saving me hours because once I finish something I know exactly what I should go on to.
I then take a quick look at my week in TickTick and my calendar to see whether each day is achievable and whether I have everything needed to start and complete each task.
Adjusting my plan as needed
I would be ecstatic if my weeks can regularly go as planned. Unfortunately this is not the case and will never be; there are too many external and internal factors to rely on. A client might not give a response in time, something more important might need my attention for the day, or I might simply not be feeling productive that day.
On days, or weeks, that become completely derailed I try not to stress. I keep a bank of auxiliary tasks, such as writing this or organising our accounts, that I can pull from upcoming days or weeks. Some days I just know it’s time to call it quits and close my laptop, opting for something more enjoyable like a swim, cycle, or series binge.
Remembering your meetings and events
I’ve said this before: I don’t trust my brain. Why should I burden it with remembering when and where I need to be at all times of the day? Instead, I should be focusing on what I’m doing right now. Everything goes in my calendar so I don’t need to stress over missing important dates and events.
Setting reminders for events
Having the events in your calendar isn’t enough if you’re not being notified at the appropriate time/s.
Digital meetings
When I have a digital meeting I set an alert for 15 minutes before the start time. This is enough time to close off what I’m currently working on, but not too much time that I’ll get caught up in something and actually miss the meeting. There have been more occasions than I am happy to admit where I have been late because I started working on something in the buffer before the meeting starts.
To avoid this potential embarrassment, I now don’t dismiss the notification until I log in to the call.
Physical meetings
Having to leave the comforts of your desk to go out into the real world requires a bit more planning. It’s not always easy to calculate how long it will take to get there, leaving enough time to find parking and taking into account potential traffic. But after adding the estimated travel time, I create an reminder to notify me 30 minutes before I need to leave. This gives me enough time to close off what I’m doing and make myself more presentable than my typical work-from-home state.
Birthdays, anniversaries, and all-day events
Important dates go in my calendar, but you know that already. I set an alert for these types of events based on their importance.
For anything that I don’t need a heads up for, such as a friend’s birthday, I’ll set an alert for that day at 8am. I usually don’t miss these, usually (sorry George).
For anything that might need some planning, such as my wedding anniversary or a holiday, I’ll set an alert for one week before and one for that day at 8am. This gives me enough time to sort out anything.
I sometimes set an alert for the day before an event, this is for events such as bank holidays. Knowing that I’m not working the next day helps me leave open work in a more manageable state for when I return to it a few days later.
Being on time and respecting others
The following points are given from a professional point of view. Although I believe the same to be true for your personal life, there are far too many complexities for me to make judgements.
Being respectful of your own time and more importantly other people’s time is essential. Being late for a meeting may imply that you believe you time is more important than the other person’s. Although you may not actually believe this, it is the given impression.
Being late tends to come down to bad planning and there shouldn’t really be any excuses for being late without notifying the other party beforehand (obviously there are exceptions).
In the inevitable situation that you are going to be late, there’s no need to stress over it. A simple notice to the person/people waiting for you is enough to show your respect and apologise for any inconveniences. This also allows the other person/people waiting for you to make accommodations if needed, such as starting the meeting, ordering a drink before you arrive, or going for a walk.
⚠️ If you’re going to be late and send a notice, it should be done before the meeting is scheduled to start.
Cancelling meetings
This pairs with being on time and respecting others. It’s frustrating to prepare for a meeting, only to be notified 15 minutes before the meeting starts that the person won’t be attending. It’s even more frustrating if the meeting was in person and the other person is already on their way.
A person’s day may be structured around that meeting and not giving a heads up is unfair for them and can easily spoil the quality of a relationship.
There are definitely times when cancelling a meeting has to be done last minute, but do consider the other person when doing so.
Disabling notifications
Notifications aren’t directly related to organisation. But if you’re relying on your device notifications, having too many may create enough visual noise to drown out the important ones.
Notifications also cause you to lose focus, known as “Switch cost”, affecting the quality of work and increasing the time needed to complete tasks. With notifications always vying for your attention you’re going to lose focus and not be able to get into a good rhythm of work.
💡 It has also been found that constant notifications can cause anxiety, depression, and impulsivity. This is an organisation book not a psychology book, for more on psychology and notifications read this Harvard Business Review article.
There are techniques, such as the Pomodoro technique where you spend 20–30 uninterrupted minutes working and then take a 5-minute break. Although I’ve seen the benefits of this technique from people around me, I’ve never managed to adopt it myself. My attention span ranges from ten minutes to two hours, depending on the task I’m working on, and confining myself to 20–30 “chunks” felt too controlling (even for me).
I’ve disabled almost all notifications on my laptop and phone. Leaving only my calendar, Slack, and messages and phone calls from my “favourites”. Anything other than those can have my attention when I’m taking a break or already distracted.
Quick points to close off with
Don’t over organise
If you’re similar to me then it can be quite easy to fall down a rabbit hole of organisation. New solutions should only be adopted for the present and the future, anything in the past should remain there until it needs to be brought back to the present. If, for example, you used to document projects in a specific application and have since moved over to a new one, don’t spend your day moving all past projects to the new system. Use the new system for new projects and only move legacy projects to the new system when they are needed, if it is possible, and if it is feasible.
Spending your time reorganising and reorganising for no added value is not the life you should be living. Take it from someone who has lived that life many times — beautifully migrating all our documentation from one system to another and three years later never having opened any of it.
Storing notes on everything
It’s always a joke amongst my friends that I have notes on everything. That is until they need the details of where we went skiing five years ago, how much we usually spend on our yearly Secret Santa gathering, or which restaurants are worth visiting in London.
I don’t expect most people to keep track of these things as religiously as I do, but it works for me and I enjoy having all these resources at hand when needed. I store my notes in two places — Apple Notes for quick and regular access notes and Notion for more details or structured notes.
Storing important information
When setting up my company in 2012 I was inundated with important information that needed to be referenced at the drop of a hat. Not only was this information important, some of it was confidential.
Not wanting to flick through box files of non-distinct paperwork or emails from ten years ago I found a secure application to store the information I pulled from these documents. There are many applications — LastPass, 1Password, Dashline — that serve the purpose.
Now wherever I am I have access to all my bank details, company information, IDs and documents, and secure notes.
Building a routine
A routine is difficult to regularly accomplish and I’m not one to believe that it should be strictly adhered to at all costs. The advice trending today is that early mornings are essential for your “hustle”.
I’ve attempted, and succeeded, in the early morning wake-ups for lengthy periods. The problem with strict routines is beating yourself up over not achieving them each day. Life is tough and things don’t always fit neatly into time boxes throughout your day. Energy levels and emotions change based on internal and external factors, work gets delayed and then piled up into a single deadline, and with this comes the need for flexibility.
It’s worth trying to build up a routine and sticking to it with the best of your capabilities. Just don’t sacrifice your happiness and mental health in order to fit into routines that aren’t working for you.
