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.

Not a Moleskine, but a mock-up for illustration

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.

The Storylines module on Ubuntu Linux

I’ve recently started brainstorming for my Master’s thesis, and turns out I’m actually going to have to do some story writing and plot outlining for the project. Seeing as I know pretty much nothing about constructing a story or developing a plot, I started doing some research on software that might come in handy for such a project, and I found this: Writer’s Café.

From the website:

Writer’s Café is a set of power tools for all fiction writers, whether experienced or just starting out. The heart of Writer’s Café is StoryLines, a powerful but simple to use story development tool that dramatically accelerates the creation and structuring of your novel or screenplay.

I’ve actually been pretty impressed with the application. The Journal and Notebook modules are fairly simple, but the Scrapbook seems like it would really useful for any creative writing project, and I have to say I am very impressed with the Storylines component. The way it allows you to manipulate virtual notecards on multiple timelines is just plain cool, not mention really handy for organizing your non-linear thoughts into a more cohesive whole.

How do you organize your thoughts when it comes to writing long-form projects? Notecards, a personal wiki, mindmap? Let’s discuss at the forum.

I have spent a long time being more than a little envious of people who could add drawings to their notes. One of the masters of this craft, Mike Rohde, has coined the term “sketchnotes” to describe this art. The main source of this envy was that I assumed that some people were simply born to be able to think visually, had a natural artistic talent, or somehow were blessed with the right genetic combination to express this skill. In other words, I never thought I would be able to do so well even if I was to try to learn.

Furthermore, I had built up such high expectations for the quality of my work, my skill level, and how others would view it. I set a high enough barrier to entry to ensure that I never would. This did not stop me from always being on the search for ways to improve my notetaking. As a matter of fact, the initial seed idea for work.life.creativity was generated by my looking for a good forum to ask people such questions.

About a month ago, Mike Rohde announced his involvement with a company called VizThink and their Visual Note-taking 101 webinar. I was immediately interested and signed up as soon as I could. Boy am I glad I did. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had. Here is what I learned:

• I learned that everyone can draw, myself included – “I’m not a visual person” is what I, and a lot of people say, when approached with such things. There is a great quote from the book The Back of The Napkin by Dan Roam. “If you were able to walk into this room without falling down…” you are enough of a visual person to get this stuff.
• I learned a lot about the false barriers we (perhaps intentionally) put up for ourselves. – By setting the bar so high (“I want to be able to draw just like Mike Rohde.”), I ensured I would never even try to start. The fact is, I’m not that good and it is just fine, because I like and understand it. The sketchnotes are for me to draw greater recall from the meeting or presentation. Who cares if they are any good.
• I learned about the freedom we give up as we grow older. – There was a great quote by Pablo Picasso early on in the webinar: “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” If you think back to your childhood, you drew stuff all the time. Crayons on coloring books way outside the lines. You didn’t care about how it looked, the selection of colors, or what other people thought. You just drew.

Most importantly, I learned the single most exiting thing I have in a long time: Look at the picture above. I can draw! I just had to learn how to give myself the permission to do so.

So far, the application and its web counterpoint, while young, are pretty much bustling with features. Here’s what I really like so far:

• Simple, clean interfaces on both the website and the mobile application make taking notes easy and enjoyable. The single greatest reason I don’t take take more notes on my phone is that it’s usually a pain. 3banana goes a long way toward making things simple enough to actually be usable.

• Tagging your notes is so easy. All you have to do to tag a note is put “#YOURTAG” somewhere in the body of your note. Simple as pie. No complicated interfaces for creating new tags; it just happens on the fly–and that’s the way it should be.

• You can take pictures and easily embed those in your notes! This is a fantastic way to easily archive your photos online, or you can add comments and share instantly via Twitter, Facebook, or a public url. Heck you can do this with any note.

• Share notes via the above mentioned methods, or generate a barcode that can be scanned by other Android users. This is one slick feature, and definitely a really cool and creative use of the barcode function on T-Mobile G1 phones.

• A bookmarklet is available you can take notes from anywhere, and have them instantly available on your phone.

• Even more features like clickable phone numbers and html support round out the package.

While there’s a lot of great stuff there, a few things are holding me back from really using 3banana for large portion of my notetaking. First, there’s no way to export notes…which is an absolute must for me. Customer support has assured me via email that this is in the works, though. Second, there’s no way to search your notes by tag or any other way in the mobile application. This really makes it practically impossible to use as your note collection grows. As soon as these two features are implemented, though, I’ll be using 3banana full force.

Find out more:

• http://3banana.com
• http://blog.3banana.com

Have you used 3banana for Android or iPhone? What’s your favorite mobile notetaking app? Let’s discuss!