This December we are discussing getting organized for the coming year, setting some goals and tracking the things that we accomplished in 2010. One of our readers, Alvina Lopez, has sent a nice note describing how she has changed her To-Do system for increased organization and success:
I am, by habit, a very disorganized person. I have a bad reputation among my friends and family for losing my things, running late for events, and forgetting important deadlines. But, I make up for my administrative faults with my great creativity. Unfortunately, when I tried to use my creativity to help me work full time as a writer, I realized that I had to take a serious look at my organizational methods if I wanted to figure out how to be successful.
I used to manage my tasks with one to-do list. Needless to say, it was a very long to-do list, because I put everything on it that needed to get done: errands, writing projects, dentist appointments; you name it, it was on there. Many of you organizational experts are probably shaking your head at how silly and naïve it was of me to try to organize myself that way. I mean, sure, I meant well. I tried to have a to-do list each day, but that list just ended up growing and growing as I copied over things from the day before.
So what I did is this: I started over. I took a day to brainstorm all of my goals. I brainstormed life goals, career goals, relationship goals, and so on. As I brainstormed them, I created categories and a timeline. The important thing for me was creating those categories and goals and putting them into a master document that I could refer to easily. Once I had these categories listed, figuring out my to-do lists was relatively easy, because I simply had to create lists that fell into each category and that supported each goal.
I did this by picking up a notebook, a nice Moleskine that I could keep with me. I sectioned it according to my categories, and then within each section I created subsections: daily to-dos, weekly to-dos. I stopped there because I felt as though my master document of goals could help me with long-term planning better than using paper to rewrite the same things for each month. Each night, I took a few minutes before I went to sleep to plan out the next day based on my goals, and I reviewed what I had accomplished.
So, then, every day I had a document to consult that would give me an idea as to what I needed to do in order to help me reach my goals. By making sure my to-do lists linked with my overall goals, I could remind myself that no matter what kind of work I had done, I had in some way made progress towards my overall goals.
A side effect of this system is that it greatly organized my schedule as well. Because I often work from home, having the book there and the various categories helped me manage my day. I could devote a few hours to one category, such as writing projects, and then once I had done one or two things from the list, I could move on to the administrative category, which would have me sending invoices to clients or bidding on future writing jobs.
Here are two more images of the mock-up.
This guest post is contributed by Alvina Lopez, who writes on the topics of accredited online schools. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez [at] gmail.com.










