I have too much going on in my life. This isn’t from a poor-me standpoint, nor is it an attempt to brag. It’s simple: I have more happening than I can reasonably keep track of. At work and in my personal life—almost everywhere—I need to make sure things get done, things aren’t forgotten, and, frankly, I’m not always great at it.
So I sometimes forget things. And it feels as if, recently, I’ve been forgetting more, especially in my personal life. At work, it seems a bit easier, as there’s a certain rhythm to it. It follows an order, but right now my personal life is much less ordered. And while at work I have developed tools and strategies to ensure I don’t forget much, I seem to be lacking those strategies in my personal life.
Work
At work, it is pretty simple. I check email quite regularly and try to keep my inbox at zero, and I fail at it every so often—quite spectacularly. It doesn’t help that we get countless notifications from certain tools at work—for example, the build pipeline or similar. We also use Outlook Calendar quite extensively.
And for stuff that is not in email, I typically have a simple to-do list on paper on my desk. I add to it and cross stuff off during the day, and at the end of the day I prioritise what I need to copy to the next day and what doesn’t need my attention anymore.
And of course we have project-specific tools. We use Jira to track issues for almost all projects, and we have Confluence spaces to document anything and everything.
Personal
Now, of course, I still have some things at home. I have my own personal calendar, and I use Fantastical to keep my stuff together. This generally works well, but every so often it’s a pain in the arse to keep my work calendar in Fantastical, as ever-new security measures basically prohibit it. I think, as a consequence, I will just not be able to have any work beyond normal working hours, as I cannot keep track of them 1.
I also have a to-do list in the form of the Things app, which I use across my phone and laptop. It generally works very well, and I’m happy with it, but I need to start using deadlines a bit more, as I’m not always great at actually doing my stuff.
Finally, I have also been taking notes in my notes app. Basically, any knowledge I might need again—but I’m not sure if it will stay in my brain (so most of it)—goes in my notes app. I have different notepads there to sort by topic, and the search function typically works very well. This helps me keep track of all kinds of stuff: what people like for their birthdays and what people strongly dislike for dinner. Things that are not always important and therefore get forgotten, but it is largely very appreciated when you know and remember them 2.
Organise my life
So how do I go from here to organise my life? Well, I think the tooling works, and I would rather not add more tools. I think, generally, I need to use these tools more reliably.
And I need to figure out a strategy to work across all the different communication channels. WhatsApp, Signal, Messages, and email all work as communication channels, but I’m not always great at keeping track of all of them. In fact, I want to make sure they don’t become even more to-do lists. So I might have to start looking at notifications in a more deliberate way and decide for each message: can be answered immediately; can be answered later directly (leave on unread); or needs a longer reply (leave on unread or quickly reply, add to my to-do list as a task).
We use a flex system, where we can work at any time, but for me the challenge is keeping track of when I work on what. As such, I have adopted pretty normal hours, and I mostly cannot do any dates outside those hours, as the connection to my personal calendar doesn’t seem to work reliably thanks to Microsoft’s modern security. ↩︎
I’ve had this discussion with a few people now about how I should be a better friend or partner and naturally remember these things. I tend to disagree. It makes me a better friend/partner by writing them down because that way I can remember much more, and I’m less likely to forget. ↩︎