Trying to get my shit together again

Time Tracking - Day Planning - Seven Habits

Call it what you will. It's time to start doing this stuff again.

I have read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I didn't like it. It's a little to spiritual for me.

I have a Palm Pilot. I have a Day Planner. I don't use either of them.

The Palm Pilot was too fiddlily, it's hard to sync, grafitti isn't fast enough. (Though I do like grafitti.) I even bought a keyboard to use with it, but I don't.

The Day Planner was a pain - having to move items on the To-Do lists by hand every morning. And I don't have enough meetings to really need a calendar.

But I'm in the familiar downward spiral again where I feel buried under stuff to do and I can't get any of it done. My desk is a disaster at work and at home. My life feels unorganized and I can't remember to do stuff.

So I'm going to try again. I've done two things so far - I've ordered a copy of Time Management for System Administrators and I found the DIY Planner Project site.

The Time Management book is likely to be more of the same, but maybe reading it again will give me the kick in the pants I need.

The DIY Planner stuff is cool. The site has tons of good content and PDF versions of all the Planner pages you might want. And if they don't have the one you really need, they have the templates and objects available for you to create your own.

I think it's time for paper again. The PDA stuff just doesn't seem to work for me and doing it on the computer (even on a laptop) is very difficult. You can't really carry it around very well and if it's not with you, then you don't use it. Plus Outlook sucks for To Do lists and the like.

I'm going to print out some of the DIY Planner pages and try to go that route again.

My biggest problem is that I'm lazy. Because I'm lazy, I procrastinate. That's why my desks are such messes. Instead of dealing with a piece of paper, I just put it on the desk.

Bad habits. Time to try and lose some of them again.

They say it takes 21 days to create a new habit. Let's see if I can go the distance this time.