Getting to grips with the mess! - Part 1

This post was originally designed to be one single post. However, due to the excessive length, I've decided to split it up into two different articles. The second one, which outlines the tools I used in a bit more detail, will be published next Wednesday.

I have a confession to make. I’m an absolutely messy and chaotic person. If you’ve ever seen my apartment when it wasn’t tidied up, you’d have seen containers & stacks of unsorted papers, unopened envelopes, etc.. Any letter that came in the door would usually be thrown on that pile. The whole situation isn’t helped by the fact that I’m an expert procrastinator. So while I’d say to myself that I’d get it done, I would usually end up finding some excuse NOT to do it, and pushing it to “later”. This “later” could mean anything between next weekend and the heat death of the universe (or the “big rip”, if the latest quasar data is to be believed). To top it off, I’m also easily sidetrack… wait, was that a squirrel?

You can see part of the mess behind the speaker on the desk in my home office. Piles like that were all over the place until recently!

Anyway, back to topic. I’m not the most organised person, and the events of 2017 and 2018 certainly didn’t help in that regard. However, by January 2019, I’d had enough. I decided to do something about it. This Post is intended to outline some of the steps I’ve taken, and who knows, maybe I’ll return to the topic and turn it into a series. Before I get to the meat and bones of this story, there’s one thing I need to make clear. I’ll be mentioning a number of companies and products throughout. I’m NOT sponsored by these companies, this is NO paid endorsement or advertisement. They are simply tools that I found, and continue to find very helpful in keeping myself organised, or at least more organised then before. With that out of the way, let’s get down to business!

The first question that needs to be addressed is, how can a complete chaos addict like me get motivated to sort the situation out? How can someone who doesn’t have an organised thought in his head get his act together? Well, one thing I can tell you is that external pressure seldom works, certainly not over longer periods of time. You can take that from me, my parents tried it NUMEROUS times, without much success. And don’t even get me started on schools. Between classes that are too large, overprotective parents, and hands-off teaching methods, they are worse than useless. Likewise, I’ve found books & TV shows to be rather less than effective, although I do have to say that Marie Kondo is certainly entertaining. The same goes for YouTube in large parts, although your mileage might certainly vary with regards to all of those points.

While it is certainly Entertaining, most of the methods on display in this show weren't really applicable in my case

For me personally, the motivation was definitely internal. Something had to change. 2017 had been marked by the death of my parents, and 2018 had been split between the legal aftershocks of their deaths, a burnout, and the announced closure of my team by May 2019 at the latest. While I certainly couldn’t change the past, I wanted 2019 to be different. Even if circumstances were beyond my control, I could at least control my own organisation. Also, I wanted to be able to let people into my apartment without feeling I have to apologise for the chaos.

Thomas Frank's Masterclass on Productivity is a different matter altogether. It really helped me.

There's a reason why his class ranks among the popular classes on Skillshare.

With that goal set, the first order of business for me was to set down a strategy how to actually achieve that. I had no idea how to even achieve that. However, I had recently signed up to a platform called Skillshare, an online learning platform, primarily to brush up on my Photoshop skills. Lo and behold, they had numerous organisation course available. I personally decided to go for Thomas Frank’s course on setting up a productivity system to get me started. While there are certain aspects of the whole system that I found to be incompatible with my way of working, I ended up adopting, with some modifications, 80% of what he laid out. I also did check out some of Marie Kondo’s stuff over on Netflix, and while not all of it “sparked joy”, there were certainly a few interesting takeaways.

The Actual Steps

Step 1 - But enough of the fluffytalk, I’m not a politician goddamnit! The first step I took was to find and set up a task management system that works for me. I needed a system that would not only remind me reliably, but also provided enough motivation to keep me going in the long run. I had tried something along those lines with the stock Reminders app in iOS and OSX, but that experience was rather underwhelming. I ended up going for Todoist. I’ll go into more detail further along in the post, when I talk about the actual tools I’m using, but in short, Todoist has been doing an excellent job in keeping me up to speed with what I need to get done. I’ve been using the system since January now, and so far it’s working out like a charm. One thing I do need to add here is that I’ve blocked off certain times of each day for certain tasks, as a way of making sure I actually have the time available for the tasks I want to do. In the same fashion, I’ve blocked off times where there’s literally nothing to do, in order to make sure I have enough time for reading books, booting up the ole’ Xbox, etc. Also, I left myself a couple of weeks to get this system to "bed in" before moving on to the next step.

Step 2 was setting up a Notetaking system, something to capture ideas and thoughts throughout the day, to give ideas some structure. I admit this was a bit of a quick one for me, since I’d already been using OneNote to keep track of my blog post ideas for quite some time. In fact, the outline of this very post was first thought up in OneNote, as are the scripts for every single one of my YouTube videos. I know that Microsoft is a bit of a touchy subject for some, and there are alternatives out there, but for me personally, it has turned out to be an ideal solution. You should definitely set up different sectors for Private topics, Work related topics, and any Side Projects you might be working on. I recommend a similar categorisation for Steps 1 and 3 as well by the way. Coming back to Notes, I once again recommend taking two to three weeks for the new system to settle in before moving on.

Step 3 was a bit more work. This involved setting up a digital file management system. My electronic record keeping had been just as “well organised” as its physical counterpart, so my files, etc. were all over the place. It took some time to develop a file structure that worked for me, and I eventually decided to go with the “life bucket” concept outlined by Thomas Frank in his course. This meant that all my documents would be organised into three main folders, Personal, Work, and Side Projects, with subfolders for different uses, right down to specific folders for each individual YouTube video. A crucial aspect of this system was the fact that it was cloud based, simply to ensure access from all of my device. I once again opted for a Microsoft product, OneDrive, for reasons that I’ll get into later in this article. All in all, it took me around 2-3 hours to get all of this sorted.

Finally, Step 4 was to finally get a grip on my paperwork. This is the part that I’d been dreading the most, and for more reasons than just the amount of work involved. I KNEW that somewhere in those mountains of paperwork was a lot of stuff relating to the death of my parents, and part of me still has trouble dealing with that kind of stuff. Still, it was cathartic in a way to finally lay those matters to rest so to speak. Besides, the experience of the first three steps carried over to the new work, and It only took me about four hours of concentrated work to finally sort it. Okay, So I may have wrecked my shredder in the process, but sacrifices must be made. Besides shredding all that paperwork that I didn’t need anymore was the most fun part of the entire process. In the process, I also found a number of very important documents that I’d been looking for for ages, including proof of some very important communication with the probates court in Germany. There’s really not a lot of tools I can give you here. All you need is a couple of ring binders, a hole puncher, and time. You should really take a day off for this, that’s what I did. Oh, and have a whole lot of those plastic document pouches ready. You’ll invariably come across crumpled documents or items that can’t be filed otherwise.

And that's it for the first part of this two parter. In the next part, we'll be taking a closer look at some of the tools that I've been using in my drive to get more organised. Stay Tuned!