Archive for ‘Time Management’ Category
Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking for Learning and Creative Projects (Part 3)
Two weeks ago, in Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking (Part 1), we looked at the wide variety of situations in which you might take notes, and took a side journey into the relative merits of handwritten vs. digital notes.
Last week, in Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking in Lectures & Presentations (Part 2), we explored solutions for taking notes when someone is imparting information to you verbally: in class, watching a webinar, attending a conference, and in collaborative meetings. Some variation on these methods work for casual note-taking situations, like when you’re learning about a diagnosis or treatment, you’re hearing about a new program at a PTA meeting, or even when you’re fielding information on a phone call.)
Whether you want to capture information for a later test, to improve your professional (or passion project) success, or help your team hit its action items, taking notes ensures that information can be captured, processed, learned, and acted upon.
Using my colleague Linda Samuels’ rubric, we looked at how to “listen, capture, and engage” with information using text-based note-taking (e.g., the sentence method, outlining, and the Cornell Note-Taking Method) and visual note-taking (e.g., mind mapping and sketchnoting).
We also harkened back to the idea that not all note-taking depends on information coming to you verbally. When you’re studying printed material as part of coursework, doing academic research (like a term paper on Alexander Hamilton) or writing a non-fiction book (like the history of sandwiches), you will need to take notes on what other people have written to achieve your goals.
You may also create notes from scratch, not based on someone else’s concepts (presented verbally or in writing), but invent something totally new with the help of the elves in your brain. You might write the score for a Broadway musical, engineer the schematics for a cool invention you aim to patent, or draft a novel about vampires from Jupiter or grandmother protesting injustice, or vampire grandmothers…
With modifications, you can take notes using the methods we discussed last week, but there are also note-taking methods that help you create and organize notes on non-verbal content.
ANNOTATION
Picture yourself studying for an exam or preparing to give a speech to your colleagues. However much material you already know, there’s going to be a larger chunk of the unknown printed in books, journal articles, and online.
The advantage of taking notes on what you’re reading is that you can take it at whatever speed you need to make sense of the information and organize it, combined with your own thoughts, without having all the inbound knowledge outpace you. The main disadvantage is that, unlike when a speaker accents what’s important (with voice, body language, or saying, “Hey, you numbskulls, this is going to be on the tests!”), text may not give you a clue as to what is vital.
Sure, textbooks may have concepts in bold or italics, but novels will not; if you’re reading the Federalist Papers, there’s no formatting to clue you in on what Alexander Hamilton (yes, him again!) thought was key. And if you’re researching to support your creative endeavors, only you know what will hit the spot.
Key Benefits of Annotating
Annotating enhances comprehension by allowing you to actively engage with the text, identify key points (either what the writer thinks is key or what is key for your purposes), ask yourself questions (so you can find answers in the text or in other resources), and record your own thoughts.
Annotation can lead to a deeper understanding of the printed word, making it easier to recall information later and prepare for discussions, writing assignments, or drafts. Annotating your notes reaps the following benefits:
- Improved comprehension — By highlighting important information and adding notes, you’re forced to actively process the text, leading to better understanding and retention.
- Critical thinking — Annotating pushes you to question the author’s arguments, identify biases, and form your own interpretations. In fact, as described in the New York Times article, How Students and Teachers Benefit From Students Annotating Their Own Writing, annotating improves metacognition, or thinking about how you think about something.
- Active engagement —The very act of writing notes as you read encourages focused attention and deeper engagement with the material. You’re less likely to let your eyes glaze over if you’re annotating the material.
- Organization of ideas — Annotations can help you identify the main points, structure of the text, and see how different concepts relate to one another. Sometimes it happens as you are annotating; other times, the act of annotating creates the magic that helps you see how things are connected later. If you’ve ever seen the TV show The Good Doctor, this is the way we see Dr. Shaun Murphy arriving at life-saving connections.
- Customization — You can add your own thoughts, reactions, and connections to the text, making the reading experience more meaningful. Whether you’re studying for a test or bringing concepts together to write a book, you can add your own metaphors or connections (and references to pop culture!) to make it resonate.
- Preparation for writing — Annotations are first drafts. They’re the key to making someone else’s first line of research into a foundation for your own work, whether you’re writing essays for Medium, research papers for a class, or a work project where you need to analyze and synthesize information from varied sources.
Analog Methods of Annotating
Marginalia
If you’ve ever scribbled notes, comments, or questions in the margins of a book, you’ve been annotating. You’ve done the active reading and critical thinking referenced above, and created a personal dialogue with the author of which only you are aware. (That’s OK, some authors are cranky and don’t welcome questions.)
Marginalia are great for when you want a quick reference for future review of the material. Last week, I was in a book club Zoom for the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals’ Authorship and Publishing Special Interest Group (no surprise, we call it the NAPO A&P SIG), discussing On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-Fiction by William Zinsser.
Our leader, my colleague Deborah Kawashima, had extensive marginalia, and used those notes to lead the discussion — and to find related material when members brought up points.
I can’t bring myself to write in books — my first job was working in a library, and books are so sacrosanct to me, I can’t bear to even make a pencil notation. I use sticky tape flags combined with handwritten notebook pages for the short term (like a book discussion) and either handwritten or digital notes when working on a blog post or book project.
Transparent Sticky Notes
I wrote extensively about the benefits of see-through sticky notes in my blog post See Your Way Clear: Organize With Transparent Sticky Notes.
To summarize, they give you flexibility when taking notes on written material. You can add non-permanent markings (especially good with library books or borrowed materials), take extensive notes without cluttering the page with marginalia, and reposition them, either on the original text, or as applicable, on your drafts or mind-maps.
Traditional Handwritten or Typed Notes
If you’re taking notes on printed resources to research an article, book, or presentation, you might need room for your mental gymnastics. Taking your notes in a bound notebook, on a sheaf of loose paper, or in a digital document will give you the ample space you need.
You’ll also be able to organize your notes — with clear headings, bullet points, numbering or outlining systems, and any kind of doodles (even marginalia on your notes) you like. The physical act of taking the notes will increase retention.
And yes, in case you’re about to remind me that I talked about how typing/digitizing lecture notes tends to reduce comprehension and memory because you tend to transcribe rather than process, I’m not flip-flopping. When you type what you hear, you don’t process it. But when you type what you read, you translate and process anything that’s not a pure quote.
Additional Analog Annotation Methods
You can also annotate without writing actual sentences, employing:
- Before beginning to read, write down what you know about the subject on a blank piece of paper.
- After you read, add new the information you’ve gained with a different color pen or marker.
- Before you read the next time, review the sheet. (Lather, rinse, repeat.)
Parish recommends storing finished sheets for periodic review and rewriting for clarity.
Digital Methods of Annotating
When taking notes on analog content, analog note-taking may be the best approach. When the material you’re studying, researching, or investigating is already in digital form, it’s often easier to annotate digitally. Some of the more popular digital annotating tools are:
- Adobe Acrobat Reader is best for annotating PDFs. It features highlighting, comments, on-screen sticky notes, drawing tools, and text markup.
- Notability is best for handwritten and mixed-media notes. It can handle handwriting, text, audio recordings, sketching, and PDF annotation. If you use an iPad and want to blend digital and handwritten annotation, Notability is ideal.
- Hypothesis works best for annotating web articles, blogs, and research. It’s a web-based tool for highlighting, adding comments, and collaborative notes on PDFs and online materials. It’s for students, researchers, writers, and teams.
Analog or digital, as with note-taking methods for verbally-presented material, annotating written material is just the beginning. Whether you “listen, capture, and engage” or “read, capture, and engage,” you still have to engage, and that means keeping your notes organized and connected to one another and the central purpose of your work. For more on annotation:
Annotating Texts (The Learning Center at the University of North Carolina)
The Art of Annotation: Teaching Readers To Process Texts (Cult of Pegagogy)
More Than Highlighting: Creative Annotations (Edutopia)
Why you should annotate your books (Johns Hopkins Newsletter)
Zettelkasten
Do you know Zettelkasten, also called the slip-box method? It was developed by Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist, to reduce researcher overwhelm and create a network of interconnected ideas, rather than one simple, static archive of information in separate silos.
David B. Clear, Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive, in: The Writing Cooperative, 31 December 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
How Zettelkasten Works
Zettlekasten was designed to be analog, using garden-variety index cards. (Obligatory link to The Humble Index Card: Organize Your Life, Then Organize Your Cards.) But with modern computing, you can link digital notes notes to one another easily, as with the internal links in Evernote. Here are the basic steps:
- Capture notes, each with practically microscopic bits of information — A note should have only one fact, concept, or idea. Brevity is the soul of Zettelkasten; so, no long, convoluted, Paper Doll-style paragraphs. Let’s say you’re writing a book: in the analog version, you’d have one quote to prove your point. At first, that quote is isolated.
- Link your notes together — Each subsequent note you take gets connected to related, already-existing notes, forming a network of ideas, a Charlotte’s Web of notions.
- Use unique identifiers — In an analog system, this means you’ll use a system of numbering or indexing the notes. In a digital system, your tools (like Evernote or Obsidian) will offer backlinks, the digital equivalents of the red yarn connecting the bad guys in a mystery movie’s murder board.
- Create “fleeting” (temporary), “literature,” and permanent notes —
- Fleeing notes let you quickly capture raw thoughts that come to you on your own, scratchpad-style. Think of them as shower thoughts.
- Literature notes are one step up; they serve to summarize key ideas from whatever resources you’ve used: articles, journals, books, lectures, etc., but in your own words. (So, don’t copy & paste, but also, don’t use AI.)
- Permanent notes are the refined, interconnected insights that build on the ideas you’ve collected and/or created.
- You may also create “meta” reference notes, which help you think about how your Zettelkasten comes together.
Develop a personal knowledge system (PKS) — Over time, your Zettlekasten becomes an idea-generating machine. It represent what you know, and what you might want to share. It could be everything your freshman needs to write a term paper for Social Studies or the amazing non-fiction self-help book that earns you a place at the top of the best-seller lists — or a series of brilliant stand-up routines George Carlin developed, as explained in this video.
How to understand Zettelkasten
Think of Zettlekasten like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game. Each note you take is an aspiring Hollywood star, just needing to be linked to someone bigger. Let’s say I’m writing a chapter on productivity.
- One lone note about time management is like an indie actor, good but totally isolated and unlikely to reach stardom.
- If I add a note about prioritization techniques, like a link to my well-established character actor Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity with the bit about the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, it’s in a movie with my time management note — one degree of separation.
- But let’s say I have a third note about Parkinson’s Law (“Work expands to fit the time available to complete it.”), link it to both the general time management note and the Eisenhower Decision Matrix note, and suddenly they’re all in a Marvel summer blockbuster about productivity!
(Hey, it could happen!)
The point is that a good Zettelkasten is not merely a random collection of notes, but an ever-growing network of interconnected concepts; developing it over time sharpens your thinking and makes your knowledge base not only more expansive, but more powerful.
Zettelkasten is perfect for researchers, authors, deep thinkers, and anyone developing a huge body of networked knowledge. If you’re writing your thesis, a series of books, or building lifelong learning, Zettlekasten is your man (well, system) for less overwhelm, more creativity and retention, better organization, and increased productivity (if handled deftly),
What are the drawbacks of Zettlekasten? It’s freaking complicated if you’re using an extensive numbering/indexing system connecting all the moving parts.
Some of the best tools to develop your own Zettlekasten include:
- Index cards of uniform size (so, go 3 1/2 x 5 or 4×6, but not both)
- Obsidian (for backlinking and networked thought)
- Roam Research (outline-style, with powerful linking capabilities)
- Logseq (a privacy-focused, open-source alternative to Roam)
For more on how Zettelkasten might fit into your note-taking (and organizing) style, read:
The Zettelkasten Method: A Beginner’s Guide (Goodnotes)
Try the Zettelkasten method to manage information overload (Atlassian)
Getting Started: The Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method (Zettelkasten)
Ahrens’ Smart Notes
Sometimes, you need to build an easier mousetrap. Sönke Ahrens, a German author, took Luhmann’s Zettelkasten ideas and modernized them for his now-classic, How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking.
Ahrens looked at Zettelkasten and said “Jeez, Louise, that’s a lot of complexity with numbering and indexing!” (Well, he said it in German.)
So, the Ahrens’ Smart Notes Method is a simplified method designed for knowledge workers (particularly academics, researchers, and writers) who want to create a structured knowledge workflow without going hardcore into the Zettelkasten approach.
Ahrens’ system focuses less on numbering or indexing of notes and places a much heavier emphasis on summarizing concepts (wherever possible) in your own words. It encourages you to write as you go, rather than taking the fleeting notes and the literature notes and then going back to write your permanent notes.
Ahrens advises creating notes with your own interpretations at an earlier stage so your notes are really first drafts. Less structure, more trusting your gut earlier on.
The Feynman Technique
Physicist Richard Feynman’s system is a learning method, not about note-taking, per se, but baked into his process for helping people understand complex topics is a way to take notes that spur the learning process.
- Write down the concept you’re trying to learn about.
- Explain it in simple terms — On the internet, you’ll often see someone say ELI5 — text-speak for “Explain it to me like I’m five-years-old.” How would you explain what you’re trying to learn to a kindergartener, or at least someone who is an absolute non-expert?
- Identify areas of confusion or gaps in your knowledge — What are you struggling to simplify? If you can’t explain it, then you don’t really know it yet.
- Review and refine your notes — Keep rewriting your notes until your explanation is crystal clear. Picture yourself writing the answer as an exam question, or presenting it on a webinar.
Feynman’s approach is less about note-taking for capturing information than for processing it until you understand it. It’s ideal for students, journalists, speakers, authors, and anyone who needs or wants to both acquire knowledge and put it to use, ostensibly to eventually communicate it to others — even if that communication is solely to pass a test on the material — or use it in their own lives. It can be an academic study aid, or a system for pursuing knowledge on a more lofty level.
Using the Feynman system encourages more active engagement with the content instead of passively copying key phrases out of a book or re-reading lecture notes. It also prompts you to seek clarity, cutting away the excess so your notes are focused and uncluttered. As a professional organizer, Paper Doll approves!
Some good tools for taking Feynman-based notes would be:
- Traditional notebooks (though it may kill trees)
- GoodNotes — especially if you’ll be using an iPad or tablet)
- Evernote — use a combination of handwriting and sketching for clarifying explanations; if you spent your time in the Microsoft environment, OneNote is a similar option.
- Notion (for refining the explanations over time)
- Flashcard apps to help reinforce key ideas over time and find them again. Examples include Anki (free, open-source), Quizlet, and Kards.ai.
DIGITAL NOTE-TAKING PLATFORMS
Beyond options for general academic purposes (and those mentioned in these three posts), there are too many specialized digital note-taking platforms to mention even a representative number.
For casual, situational note-taking on your phone or organizing notes for travel, Apple Notes, Evernote, OneNote, and Google Keep suffice.
Creative writers and journalists alike benefit from Scrivener to keep their research close to their writing; novelists might like Campfire for character notes, world-building, and plotting. Know someone composing musical notes? Try 7 Best Music Writing Software Programs for DIY Musicians or Resources for Creating Your Own Sheet Music.
HYBRID NOTE-TAKING: A MARRIAGE PERFORMED BY A ROBOT
AI’s role in note-taking will continue to expand in ways we can’t imagine. Right now, we can feed our notes (whether handwritten or typed) into an AI to yield notes on our notes.
You could record a lecture, interview, or meeting and ask your favorite AI for a transcript so you can focus on just key concepts and then go back to flesh things out. After reviewing the transcript, you could ask the AI to write an outline or summary.
Last week, I uploaded the link for the podcast I did with Frank Buck and asked ChatGPT to outline and summarize our conversation. It was revelatory. I stored links, the actual video, and the outline in Evernote to link to other podcast appearances. If I uploaded the audio file, with the click of a button, Evernote could transcribe the entire conversation!
Did you know that your (paid) Zoom account’s Smart Assistant can not only transcribe any Zoom call, but can summarize the chat messages and identify action items? Whatever audio or video recordings you create in any setting, you can turn around and use a variety of AI platforms to transcribe, summarize the discussions, identify next steps, and draft an email to your boss explaining why you deserve a raise!
You can have an AI interrogate your own notes to help you find specific research material without having to hand-search with Command-F. Imagine you’re writing a book and have 1000 research notes in PDF form. Upload them to a tool like Google’s Notebook LM, and instead of having the AI find content from all over the web (and risk AI “hallucinations,” false content), you can have it just provide you with snippets of research specific to what you want to write about that day. Scarily, you can even have “conversations” with the AI about the notes you’ve taken!
Nota bene: the future (of note-taking) is going to get weird.
Paper Doll Post:
Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time
Pardon me, handsome stranger, would you happen to know the time?
I can’t find a trace of 1988 or ’89.
If you see the daredevil ghost of my youth go racing by (woah-yeah)
Will you flag him down and let him know I’ll be running a good ways behind?
A Tall Stand of Pines, ©1998 Jeff Holmes/The Floating Men (From the album The Song of the Wind in the Pines)
If you’ll indulge me, let’s start with the inspiration for this post. Last weekend, after five years of avoiding all large groups out of an abundance of COVID caution, I did something essential for my mental health. I saw my favorite band in concert two nights in a row.
I started seeing The Floating Men perform in 1993, and went to just about every gig near me until the last time they performed in Chattanooga, in 2010. I’d also seen them in Johnson City and Nashville, TN, and most memorably, for 30th birthday (with family and friends) in Atlanta.
Their songs range from keening heartbreakers to joy-filled romps, all with complex lyrics and reflecting a louche, delightfully misspent life. I am an old, overly cautious soul, so I’ve lived a misspent youth vicariously through those songs. Seeing The Floating Men’s live made me unceasingly happy.
The Floating Men, Barrelhouse Ballroom, January 19, 2025
The bandmates’ “real” careers took them all over the country, so it had been a long time since they played together. But the fandom, The Floatilla, remains loyal. When the band scheduled one Nashville show in 2024, it sold out in moments; they added another night, and the same thing happened; and a third night. No tickets for me. But for this year, they scheduled one (and then two) shows in Chattanooga, and five years of caution gently stepped aside. Echoing Robert Frost, I can only say, “And that has made all the difference.”
In Act V, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the erstwhile king bemoans that:
I wasted Time and now doth Time waste me.
King Richard II was indecisive, squandered opportunities, and was forced to relinquish his crown. Time was once a resource he could have directed, but once imprisoned, time became a force that eroded his life and meaning.
Last week, in How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity, I wrote about time tracking as a tool for mindfully ensuring that your actions align with your goals and values. That post focused on the minutes and the hours, the nitty-gritty of our lives.
However, I keep coming back to the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We “manage” our time (our days), seeking out new ways to be efficient and get specific tasks done. But fewer of us are adept at working on the bigger picture, making sure that the larger aspects of our lives intentionally arc toward meaning.
Today, we’ll look at how we perceive time and ways to elevate our appreciation of the passage of it in order to organize a life that better reflects what we want. We’ll also review tools to help us achieve a more ongoing sense of mindfulness about the passing of the days (and years) of our lives.
APPRECIATE THE SPEED OF TIME
When Daylight Saving returns, and you Google (for the seventh time) how to change the clock in your car, do you grumble that it feels like we just fell back, and now we were springing ahead? But you’ve also sat in interminably long meetings, shocked that each glance at the clock shows only a minute has passed.
What time “is” and what it feels like can be very different.
Time is a precise, but in some ways, arbitrary set of measurements for something we have never fully understood. St. Augustine believed that time actually just “sits between our ears.” There’s no actual external, objective, universal time; our measurement of time has (mostly) become culturally accepted, but it’s just by collective agreement that we measure time in 60 increments of seconds, 60 minutes, etc.
(Admittedly, the 24-hour day is fairly fixed by the Earth’s rotations, but the number of days in a year is a convention. The Jewish calendar, for example, has lunar months, 28 days each; to make up for the “extra” time, there’s an additional month in a leap year.)
For more on the history, philosophy, psychology, physics, and neuroscience of time, I recommend In Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick.
In a BBC article from September, Why Children Perceive Time Slower Than Adults, Teresa McCormack, a professor of psychology at Queen’s University in Belfast, notes that children’s comprehension of time is understudied. We know that tiny humans’ concepts of linear time are limited, and their understanding of time as a dimension (with a sense of duration) is slow to develop.
Adults, however, have both the vocabulary to mark spans of time and understanding of how time works:
- time is unidirectional and linear (outside of time travel movies)
- time is unified such that there is only one timeline (again, outside of fiction), and
- time is event-independent (meaning it’s objective, continuing while we sleep, and existing independent of human perception). Trippy!
But aside from vocabulary and complex neurology, why do kids experience time as moving quickly but it seems to pass more quickly as we age?
One simple answer, explained well on the Inverted Passions blog, is that we have a biological imperative for survival which prompts us to take note of anything that helps us make predictions regarding the future.
Investment legalese says “past performance does not guarantee future results,” but we know that things that worked for us before (or conversely, that caused awkwardness or danger) might happen again; our brains hold onto whatever helps us make predictions. But, when something novel happens, our brains stop and pay attention!
When you’re little, everything is novel. Every experience, whether the cause-and-effect of flipping a light switch or what a sneeze feels like, is new. That’s why we have granular memories of our youths through our college days, but why, other than our first days on a job or meeting our significant others, the rest of adulthood starts to blend fuzzily together.
Our adult lives are routinized; patterns repeat; life whizzes by. Yesterday is like tomorrow is like January 87th; it’s all the same. But we remember each day of our big vacations, doing new things in new places, perhaps with new people.
Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived.
Predictability helps keep us alive, anthropologically-speaking, but novelty is what allows us to reflect on a life well-lived. Share on XMEMENTO MORI AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME
Are you familiar with the term memento mori? It’s Latin, meaning “Remember you must die.”
A reminder of the fleeting nature of life and our impending mortality may sound depressing, but it’s been used in literature, art, and architecture, and as a meditative practice, throughout history. None of us gets out alive, so we need to make our lives more about meaningful moments and less about to-do lists rivaling the length of CVS receipts.
Memento mori helps us realign our priorities — or at least take note when we are not living according to our stated values.
It’s worth revisiting Toxic Productivity Part 3: Get Off the To-Do List Hamster Wheel, where I wrote the following:
REVISITING FINITUDE: THE MACRO AND MICRO APPROACH
Our time on this rock is limited. A central tenet of Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is the ability to see the shortness of life, examine your goals and values, and maximize spending your time on what matters most. This isn’t some hippy-dippy philosophy that says that if we all stop worrying about work or making money, we’ll find ourselves in a vast utopia.
Rather, it notes that life is hard, life is short, and feeling like you only have a right to be here if you’re accomplishing things that make money — whether for your company or yourself (even, or especially, if you are your company) — leads to frittering away the most valuable commodity: life.
Tim Urban’s stellar Wait But Why blog broke ground in this arena. Allowing for a little more time on the planet than Burkeman, Urban posited that we might have 90 years of life, so 4680 weeks rather than 4000.
One of his most famous posts, back in 2014, urged readers: visualize your life in years, your life in months, your life in weeks, your life in number of remaining SuperBowls…to appreciate what you do with your time.
For example, I’ve got got 2860 of my weeks behind me. It’s tempting to use these kinds of visualizations for dismay; certainly they can lead to existential angst and even more productivity dysmorphia. “See?” one might yelp! “I have even less time to make the widgets! To earn the money!” And yet, as we’ve seen over the last two weeks, that attitude just leads to focusing more on the quantifiable value you create for others; we want to look at quality, not quantity.
But, we can still turn to Urban for guidance. As a follow-up to his macro look at the finitude of life, he developed a way to organize and examine our lives at the micro level in 100 Blocks a Day.
Inspired by Urban, nomadic programmer Jama of Notion Backups, has identified a way to pause and reflect, giving perspective on where you are, chronologically speaking, in your day (rather than in your life). Rectangles.app gives you a quick glance at how much of today has gone by, in ten minute increments, as of the point in your day when you click the link. Click later in the day, more boxes turn green.
For example, when I visited and took this screenshot, I’d made it through 93 1/3 ten-minute blocks in my day.
When faced with how much of your day has passed and how much is left, you might have the following reactions:
- Yikes, I’d better get cracking! (A good motivation if you’ve been staring at social media or playing a video game for hours on end, for sure.)
- Yikes, I’ve been working and working, and I’ve only written 17 TPS reports and attended 5 hour-long meetings! (A likely sign of productivity dysmorphia creeping in around the edges.)
- Yikes, all I’ve done all day is work. I haven’t talked to anyone I love, I haven’t exercised or gotten any fresh air. I haven’t laughed. (And here’s where the magic might begin!)
If you’ve been experiencing signs of burnout due to toxic productivity, give this approach a try. Click on Rectangles and think about the day you’re having. Maybe even text the link to a friend, describe your day thus far, and get a reality check from someone who sees you more clearly.
Expanding from how much time is in a day (1440 minutes) to how much time is left in our lives, memento mori yields perspective. There are digital and analog options for helping you do just that.
ANALOG APPROACHES TO MEMENTO MORI
The Meditative Marble Method
Purchase a bag of colorful marbles and display them in an attractive glass jar. Create a ritual such that each day (or perhaps weekly, on Saturday or Sunday), you remove a marble from the jar and think about what you accomplished and gave your life meaning the last day (or week). This isn’t how many blog posts you wrote or how many new clients you signed on, but the intentional awareness of meaningful time spent with your partner, child, or friends, or special things you did to make your life a little more worthy of reflection.
Now, move the marble out of the jar to somewhere else (like an identical jar). If you planned to use this ritual weekly, you’d need to buy at least 52 marbles; daily, you’d want at least 366 (to cover leap year).
Perhaps carry that day’s marble around with you in your pocket to give you a visceral reminder all day that your time has precious value.
Perpetual Calendars
In my prior television career, I sent a lot of faxes, and that meant a lot of cover pages, and you always had a field to write the date. Unless you’re time traveling, it’s not 1997, so we’re not sending faxes much anymore. Instead, most of us check our phones or give a shout to Siri to see what the date is.
Just as digital time feels vague and unmoored from the rest of the hour, seeing just today’s date doesn’t give a sense of how today relates to the rest of the week or year.
Something more three-dimensional may help you be contemplative about the days as they pass.
See the MoMA Sliding Perpetual Calendar, designed by Giancarlo Cipri.
The Sliding Perpetual Calendar is made of plastic (so, not particularly environmentally sustainable) and measures 12 high x 9.2 wide x 0.3″ deep. You can mount it to the wall or prop it up on its included pegs. Each day, slide the red dots down the chutes-and-ladders (OK, just chutes) to select the day, month, and date. It’s currently available from MOMA for $48 ($43.20 for members).
Make the changing of the date into a device-free daily ritual and an opportunity to be mindful and intentional about the activities with which you fill your life.
Any perpetual calendar with moving pieces will work for this purpose. Other options:
Vosarea Perpetual Desk Calendar is wood, so it’s a bit better for the environment, and measures 12.8″ wide x 5.9″ high. (There’s no information on depth.) While it takes up horizontal real estate, the footprint is minimal. Amazon has it for $18.19 with a digital coupon.
ComiHome Perpetual Calendar Date Desk Calendar measures 10″ wide x 10″ high and has a sleek, modern look. This magnetometer calendar has a circular ring for the month and day of the week, a horizontal plane for displaying the date, and three magnets for selecting each, manually. It comes in red and black, or black and white and runs $22.99 at Amazon.
Deerine Wooden Block Perpetual Calendar is an upgrade the old-school block/cube calendar. It comes in pink, green, blue, black, and wood-grain, and runs $13.99 at Amazon. It measures 5.9” wide x 1.92” deep x 4” tall and is made of wood.
Journaling
It’s easy for days and then months to zip by without giving any thought to intentions beyond getting through the day. It’s like how the calendar pages flip and fly off in old black-and-white movies to let you know that significant time has passed. In old photo albums, you can gauge the passage of time by the change of hairstyles and clothing. But to percieve the changes (or lack thereof) in ourselves, a snapshot isn’t enough.
I’ll admit, I’m not skilled at journaling or adept at looking at my life as a big picture. I’m more of a to-do list person. I often write the blog posts I need to read, so I suspect that’s why I’ve been thinking about memento mori.
There are numerous apps for journaling, but I believe we’re more likely to put in emotional effort and pour out heartfelt thoughts on paper. I encourage you to try an analog journaling method if you are able. Something as simple as a One Line a Day journal for capturing the most vivid or uplifting aspects of life might be a good start.
Use Visual Time Trackers
Print or buy a copy of the grid squares from the Wait But Why post referenced above and track your life in weeks by shading the squares.
CONSIDER YOUR MORTALITY DIGITALLY
These apps are designed specifically to encourage memento mori.
Death Clock
The Death Clock app, available for iOS and Android, uses your answers to a questionnaire about your age, sex, lifestyle habits, and nation of residency to predict a death date. It’s not quite as grim as it sounds. Death Clock is AI-powered to help increase your longevity by helping users understand the impact of current habits on life expectancy and encourage making changes to live a longer, fuller life.
Their makers describe it: “It’s like having a personal grim reaper, but with health tips.” The app is free, but some features require a paid subscription.
Life: Just One
Life: Just One, created by Julien Lacroix for iOS, was inspired by the Wait But Why post. It’s designed to help users recognize that their time is precious and make the right decisions by allowing them visualize the approximate number of years, months, and days they have left on this earth.
Atypical for apps these days, it pushes no notifications, has no ads, and there’s no sign-up. It collects no life data. The basic app is free, though the Pro level unlocks widgets, a “life in weeks” section, and full customization.
WeCroak
WeCroak was inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying:
To be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.
Each day, the WeCroak app sends five notifications to invite users to stop and contemplate death (and, by extension, the value of life).
Rather than coming at predictable times, the “invitations” arrive randomly and can arrive at any moment (“just like death,” their web site states). Upon receipt, users open the app to reveal a quote from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker on the topic of death and may choose to pair contemplation with conscious breathing or meditation.
The WeCroak app is free to use on a variety of platforms including Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple Vision and Android.
Additionally, WeCroak has subscription-based Leap programs, providing challenges to help “face impermanence in all its aspects and live better lives today.”
Life Clock
Life Clock is a simple, platform-agnostic website. Enter your birthdate and time, and the result is a swiftly moving digital readout of your age to 12 post-decimal point places. Click the right arrow to get your age in months to ten decimal places; click again to get your age in months; click again for your age in days, hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
You can even see your age in lunations (lunar cycles), dog years, fortnights, galactic years, kilometer light traveled, Poincaré recurrence times (a theorem which theorizes that everything that’s happening now will happen again in exactly the same way!), heartbeats, your age in Friends or Game of Thrones marathons, and more! The data isn’t deep, but offers perspective.
Related apps include 0280, Mori Master, Life Left, and Memento Mori Stoic Reminder.
Ask AI Bots to Play Jeeves
Super-techie? Let AI remind you that life is short and precious:
- Schedule Telegram to deliver daily memento mori reminder messages or affirmations.
- Learn how to make a reminder bot on Discord with dotReminder.
- Contemplate life’s impermanence with Memento Mori GPT-Reflective AI Companion
- Use a service like Replika or create custom bots.
ORGANIZE AND ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR VALUES
You know the story of the professor, the jar, the rocks and the sand, right?
Once you see your life racing by, you may be inclined to focus on the big rocks. In addition to applying all of the organizing and productivity lessons this blog shares weekly, try a strategic approach.
Audit Your Life
Identify what really matters to you. Sit quietly and write down your top 5 values: being more present in your children’s lives, leaving a professional, personal, or financial legacy, improving your health to live better longer, having more adventures, being creative, etc.
Look at your calendar and your bank account. Examine how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention.
Does your spending reflect your values? Are you giving time to your priorities or just whatever is loudest?
Look at how you spend your three currencies: time, money, and attention. Look at your calendar and bank account. Do they reflect your values? Share on XWrite a Personal Mission Statement
Channel your inner marketing director and figure out what you want your life legacies to be. Post your mission statement where you can see it.
Organize Your Life to Invest in Meaningful Experiences
What are your big rocks? If it’s time with loved ones, personal growth, and joy, do you have inviolable time for vacations, family dinners, or learning opportunities scheduled?
I’ve often referenced Laura Vanderkam’s book Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. Her Rule 6 encouragesus to have identify one “big adventure” (lasting perhaps half a weekend day) and one “little adventure” (lasting an hour) each week to introduce novelty.
As Vanderkam has explained, “We don’t ask where did the time go when we remember where the time went.”
What’s keeping you from scheduling adventures?
For five years, I had so few “adventures,” I can count them on one hand, twice meeting up with Nashville colleague Sara Skillen for day trips and last summer’s 1900-mile round trip road trip to see Paper Mommy and go to my college reunion. My two-night adventure of going to see The Floating Men was transformative, reminding me what I want in my life.
Revisit Your Audit Periodically
Memento mori isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Build time into your day, your week, your month, and your annual review to put more life in your life.
Memento Vivere
Author Annie Dillard said, “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.”
Actress Kelly Bishop (A Chorus Line, Dirty Dancing, Gilmore Girls) wrote in The Third Gilmore Girl: A Memoir, “Don’t cry because you think your best days are gone. Smile because you had them in the first place.” So make sure you have them!
Memento mori (“Remember you must die”) has a sibling concept: Memento Vivere — Remember to live. Make every moment count: through mindfulness, gratitude, engagement, a sense of purpose, and celebration.
The lyrics to the song at the start of this post are a little salty for a “family” organizing blog, but I want to share my love of The Floating Men with Paper Doll readers. You can find their catalog on Spotify and Apple Music, and lots of (mostly ancient) concert video on their YouTube channel. And for the first time since 2009, they’ve got a digital EP, #Reoverimagined, with new (joyous) songs and fun bonuses, including:
Thank you, readers, for this extra-long indulgence, and thanks to Jeff, Scot, and The Floating Men for more than three decades of reminding me to (really) live!
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Jeff Holmes & Paper Doll (left); Scot Evans & Paper Doll (right) — Barrelhouse Ballroom, 1/18/25
Paper Doll Post:
How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity
Have you ever reached the end of a day, collapsed onto your couch, and thought, “Where did the day go?”
Time is slippery like that—it vanishes into the ether when we’re stuck in meetings, running errands, or just hanging out and taking a truly shocking number of trips to the fridge.
Back in May 2020, I wrote Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation. That post looked at how stress and the lack of novelty in our days (such as during lockdown, when every day is much like any other, or that mystery week between Christmas and New Year’s, where nothing feels “real”) can make us lose touch with our experience of time.
Conversely, how do you feel when your schedule is jam-packed with back-to-back client meetings, or there’s no breathing room between getting the kids to school and yourself to work and then reversing course at the end of the day and taking care of everyone else’s needs and you don’t have a minute to exhale? (Did you feel out of breath getting to the end of that run-on sentence?)
When we don’t have variety — it’s the spice of life, or haven’t you heard? — or we’re overtaxed without the chance to pause and reflect, time can cease to have any meaning.
That’s where time tracking comes in: it’s like a GPS for your hours, showing you exactly where your minutes travel without you noticing. Unfortunately, the idea of logging every little thing you do can feel about as appealing as untangling a drawer full of mismatched USB charging cables. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
This past week, I’ve been participating in Laura Vanderkam’s Time Tracking challenge. (She has a free Time Makeover Guide and time-tracking spreadsheets in 15-minute and 30-minute increments, each in PDF, Excel, and Google formats.)
I’ve done Laura’s challenges each January for several years, and am always intrigued by how it impacts my productivity during the week even before I start analyzing the data. (More on that next week!)
Before we move on, I have to put in a plug for two of my favorite books Laura’s, her classic 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think and the oft-mentioned Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters.
Today, we’re going to look at the perks and pitfalls of time tracking and see how to make it work for you (without driving yourself loopy).
The Benefits of Time Tracking
If you’ve ever worked a job where your supervisor required you to report what you did with every moment of your day, you may be (understandably) disgusted with the concept of time tracking. When forced to track the minutia of your day for someone else to analyze it, you can feel judged, micromanaged, maybe even infantilized.
However, when you track your own time, it can be empowering. In fact, time tracking may reveal some surprising insights about your daily habits.
Yes, you may have scrolled your social media feed for far too many sessions for your comfort, but tracking your time might help you see that right before most of those digital mental escapes, you were dealing with cranky customers or a stress-inducing in-law, or you were sluggish post-meal.
No one moment stands on its own, so tracking your time doesn’t merely show you what you’ve done, when, and for how long, but shows the pattern of your time usage. Whether your behavior is consistent or inconsistent over time can help you dig a little deeper than knowing you worked on a blog post for 47 minutes or that you spent an hour and a half at Target.
Let’s look at some of the ways time tracking helps.
Mindfulness and Focus
By virtue of measuring something, we bring our attention to it. Without attention to how you’ve been spending your time, there’s little chance of intentionally spending in more effective and efficient ways.
If I asked you what you did last Friday afternoon, you might recall a major event you’d been working toward, unexpected occurrences (whether positive or, more likely, negative), and annoyances (whether large or small), but remember little of the granularity of your day. Time tracking helps you identify, in as granular and detailed a way as you like, how you really spend your time vs. your perceived activity and time usage.
Once you mindfully pay attention to what you’re doing (or have just done, over the last half hour) and log it, it will be easier to highlight when you’ve been inefficient (e.g., fighting with a piece of software vs. having someone help you figure out what’s wrong) or areas for improving what you do, how you do it, or when you do it, and figure out what you might want to delegate, or stop doing altogether.
But you can’t go by your gut, because your gut makes small annoyances seem larger (especially if they are repeated over time) and as though they lasted longer than they actually did.
Tracking our time allows us to measure how we deal with all manner of experiences, and that focused attention helps us better predict our future time needs.
Prioritization
It’s not only a matter of catching yourself “wasting” time, or even spending too much time on the wrong thing. Time tracking clarifies which tasks consume the most time and effort; it’s your role to analyze whether the things taking the most time represent what’s the most valuable.
Are the unimportant things taking a lot of time, leaving you few high-focus and high-energy sections of your day to focus on what’s meaningful?
Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values?
Do your actions and the use of your time match your goals and values? Share on XOf course, not everything that takes the most time is the most important for you to accomplish, and vice versa. Time tracking, and seeing how much time you currently put into accomplishing certain tasks, can help you distinguish between what’s “urgent” and/or “important,” as we’ve frequently discussed when reviewing the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
Only then can you “wasted” energy toward what really matters.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Having actual numbers to back up your interpretation of what’s working (and what’s not) in your schedule is a game-changer. It will grant you actionable insights — prompts for what to do differently — to optimize your current routines and workflows.
When you time track, you’ll have a real-time account of where your time goes — towards what is:
- important and urgent
- important but requiring scheduling during your “deep work” hours
- urgent but unimportant and can be delegated, and
- what’s really so lacking in urgency and importance that it can be drop-kicked into Never-never Land.
In this way, time tracking supports goal-setting and monitoring progress over time.
Time tracking identifies how long tasks take, enabling better planning based on more realistic estimates of how long certain tasks will take to complete in the future.
Stress Busting
Oh, and those realistic estimates time tracking produces? They can reduce overwhelm* by showing you what you can reasonably do (and what you can’t) in the course of a day so that you’ll stop trying to ten pounds of sugar tasks into a five-pound sack of schedule.
If you can clearly see that you can’t get a blog post done in an hour when your kids are at home (or that trying to get it done in one long sitting will keep you from getting seven other things done), you’ll stop forcing yourself to live by unreasonable, unrealistic expectations.
In turn, this can empower you to set better boundaries (for yourself, and for others who demand or encroach on your time) and ensure you schedule breaks more effectively so that you’re doing high-focus deep work when you have high mental energy.
Accountability
A well-known saying is that what we measure gets done. If you’ve ever been in Weight Watchers, you know that they make you log everything you eat. When you know someone’s going to look at your seventeen logged mini Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on Thursday night, you’re more likely to put the bag back after your third nibble, and maybe lose some weight.
Similarly, while the purpose of tracking time is to get a realistic take on what you’re doing with your time, knowing that you’ll be judging your time use later may help you avoid self-soothing “time wasters” when you’re on deadline and need to stay on task.
Time tracking encourages greater tasks focus in real time. You’ll anticipate, note, and deter distractions when you’re aware of how every minute counts toward your goals. (And while you may not like the experience of judging yourself, it’s better than when your boss does it, right?)
The Challenges and Obstacles of Time Tracking
The concept of time tracking is a great one, but even great things can be problematic. We need to be realistic about how it can trip us up so we can avoid falling over Dick Van Dyke’s ottoman.
Time tracking can be a time sink. Remember that asterisk above about how time tracking can reduce overwhelm? It can, but when tracking your time feels like it’s eating into your day because you have to stop too often to note what you’re doing, you may get frustrated.
Time tracking can interrupt your flow. Some people try to track their time so contemporaneously with their actions that they can’t focus on their deep-focus or creative work.
Time tracking can be boring. There’s tedium in tracking everything. Time tracking can feel counterproductive if you’re taking time away from productive activities to note what you’re doing too many times in the course of an hour.
Time tracking may be used to procrastinate. If you don’t like what you’re doing, either at work or with your life, it’s easy to spend a lot of time fussing over color-coding or pretty fonts (or all the bells and whistles of a digital tracker) to the point where you’re not really leaving much time for the real work.
Perfectionism paralysis can be a type of procrastination. If you obsess over every detail of how you track your minutes, to the point that tracking your time causes you to stress about starting any task, very little of your actual work will get done.
Additionally, resistance to change can short-circuit your efforts in two ways.
First, for people who have mental roadblocks to starting a new habit, it can be difficult to train themselves to track their time. If you’re resistant to making the effort to track time, none of the benefits of time tracking can be reaped.
A second, more insidious problem is that the data you get — and the realization of what you’re really doing with your time (whether wasting it or giving too much time to others as a people pleaser, or just being stuck in crummy jobs or relationships) — may force an issue you’re not ready to deal with.
For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn?
For time tracking to be meaningful, you have to ask yourself: are you ready to confront your inefficiencies or bad situations? And are you ready to make changes based on what you learn? Share on XFinally, the prospect of time tracking can trigger privacy concerns. If you’ll dillydally over selecting a digital time-tracking tool because of concerns over privacy, you have two alternatives: choose tools that respect your data boundaries or opt for analog tracking.
Make Time Tracking Work for You
So, how do you avoid those pitfalls?
Start Small
If you anticipate feeling overwhelmed by the practice of time tracking, know that you aren’t bound by any overly ambitious practice. Take baby steps.
For example, aim for a single-day experiment on a random Wednesday when you’re not anticipating major kerfuffles in your schedule.
Similarly, don’t feel like you have to start out with too granular a measurement. I generally track in 15-minute increments, but you might feel more comfortable in 30-minute slots. You’re not writing down the call you made at 1:02 p.m., 1:16 p.m., and 1:22 p.m., but rather “Made client confirmation calls” from 1-1:30 p.m. If that thirty minute slot of one category of activity yields enough information, so be it.
Once you’ve tried a one-day tracking effort, you could opt to expand, gently. For example:
- Try one tracking day per month, changing the day of the week each time. You get two chances at a “normal” Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and can either take two monthly breaks, maybe during summer vacation and December, or use some months to track weekend days to analyze how your personal time is flowing.
- Consider one time-tracking week each year. As noted, I do this as part of Laura Vanderkam’s annual January challenge, but you could do it each spring as a time management refresher, or to coincide with the fresh start of back-to-school each fall.
- Track just the time that you suspect is harboring your time gremlins and vampires. If you (and your team) are satisfied with all you accomplish during the workday, but you feel like you’re doggy paddling at home, then tracking your office tasks may not be necessary.
Pick the Right Tools for You
When I track my time, I do a week at a time on an Excel spreadsheet with columns for each day of the week and rows for each quarter hour, which I keep open but minimized on my screen.
You could use a pre-made tracker or create one for yourself. Or go really low-tech and draw or write out your daily blocks of time from waking to bedtime on a sheet of notebook paper or graph paper — or just track your work hours. (But remember, if you do decide to color-code or make it fancy, do that during your planned recreation time time and not during the period you should be doing the logged, tracked work!)
Alternatively, there are numerous digital time tracking software programs and apps, including:
- Rescue Time — This is the grand-daddy of time tracking software; I wrote about it seventeen years ago, when I first started blogging. Rescue Time will automatically track all of your computer-based work and then provide reports on your time trends. Rescue Time has solo and team plans, all paid (after a 14-day free trial).
- Toggl Track — This veteran platform offers free (for up to five users) automated time tracking, making it ideal for solopreneurs and freelancers, with paid versions for teams. It’s accessible from anywhere via computers or mobile devices.
- Timeular — If you want completely seamless time tracking that’s operating system-agnostic (it works on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, Linux) and an offline tracking option, Timeular may be for you. However, note that it’s paid-only (after a 30-day free trial). Timeular also has an AI tracker and a cool physical tracker (an eight-sided doohickey where you can assign and link facets of the doohickey to categories of work you do).
- Clockify — This time tracking software has plans ranging from free, basic, and standard, to pro and enterprise levels, with increasing variety of features. It’s more basic than Toggl Track, but also feels a bit easier to learn. Even the free level has unlimited tracking, reports, projects, and users.
- Harvest — This offers free, pro, and premium plans and is designed for freelancers. It’s available for all major operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web, as well as browser extensions). While it’s simple to learn and has myriad integrations with other software programs, the free plan is fairly limited. (If you’re just starting to explore time tracking, though, simple is better!)
- Memtime — This has a pretty minimalist interface, so the simplified, automatic time tracking makes it super-easy to use. However, it’s only available for desktop use (so, no mobile tracking) and it’s a paid-only platform (after a 14-day free trial), so it wouldn’t be your best option for first-effort time tracking. Above the basic level, it offers a wide variety of software integrations. Note that Memtime claims, “We’re the only automatic time tracker that guarantees privacy by keeping your activity data offline.”
If you want something less corporate and more minimalist and mindful in a time tracker, you might want to look at Hourlytics (iOS-only) or Balance (MacOS-only). If everything you need to track is computer based, Monitup has an AI-based tracker, but if you’re cool logging everything on the phone, HoursTracker® Time Tracker works on iOS and Android.
Only you know what kind of tracking system — analog, basic spreadsheet, or digital app — will keep you committed to the experience.
Think Patterns, Not Perfection
It’s easy to note one-off times where you went down a rabbit hole on a particular research project or social media thread, but don’t beat yourself up over less-than-ideal time use.
Punishment isn’t the point! Instead, remember that one purpose of time tracking is investigating what doesn’t work so you can find what does.
Because of this, focus on trends. Are you always in a slump after lunch, distracting you from high-focus mental tasks? Maybe you need to schedule more physical tasks until you work off that post-lunch sluggishness, or try tasks that take less brain power.
Set Goals, Then Support Them
Your time tracking efforts will yield a wealth of information about what you’re doing that barely registers in your mind as a “task” (like picking up after your kids or straightening the company supply closet because everyone else leaves it a mess). You’ll see what’s taking too much time, what should be scheduled at different times (or delegated or given up on altogether), and where you have opportunities to do more things or do the same things differently.
Use what you learn from time tracking to help you set your goals; think: what gives you joy or feeds your values? Then schedule supporting efforts in a way to improve your productivity on the things that matter the most to you, whether it’s for money-generating work or happiness-generating life.
The Big Picture
I get why time tracking has a bad rap. If you ever had a bad boss like Gary Cole’s passive-aggressive Bill Lumberg from Office Space, you probably only remember the nasty edge of being asked to track your time.
We should reframe time tracking as a positive, empowering practice, just like practicing mindfulness, gratitude, yoga, or anything that benefits personal development. If we choose to see time tracking’s value as a learning tool about ourselves, rather than a rigid system leading to pejorative judgment, we can reap some pretty impressive benefits.
Time tracking doesn’t need to be done 24/7/365. And tracking your time without reflecting on what your data tells you is going to have fairly limited results. But periodic time tracking, with reflection and review of that data, will help you refine your routines so your schedule of what you do and when you do it can guarantee more wins. Just remember to:
- Find balance — Be just comprehensive enough in your tracking to yield good, meaningful data, but not so much that it becomes a source of stress or uses too much of your time. Make your system flexible.
- Embrace the unexpected — Be openminded about what you find. Even the act of tracking less-productive moments (hello, social media!) can teach you something about yourself and your needs — variety in your workflow, downtime, or maybe even for a different job or relationship that builds you up instead of draining your energy and causing you to self-soothe to inefficient levels.
Time tracking is your personal productivity GPS. Use it to help you read the map of your life, identify where you are, and travel the best possible path to your preferred destination.
Today’s post was about the literal passage of time — being mindful what we are doing with it — so that we can be more productive and self-aware.
But as I noted at the start, time is slippery. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “The days are long, but the years are short.” We spend a lot of time rushing to accomplish tasks, mostly for others but sometimes for ourselves, but our awareness of time (and the passage of it), both on a daily basis and as the infrastructure of our lives, can be murky.
Next week, we’re going to look at how we can do more to appreciate the speed of the passage of time to organize a life that better reflects what we want. I’ll also share tools to help us stay mindfully aware of the passing of our moments, our days, and our years.
Do you track your time? Share in the comments!
Paper Doll Post:
Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Finish Off Your Unfinished Tasks
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
~ William James
Yes, I know I’ve used this quote here before, but it’s an important one, especially at this time of the year.
As I type this post, there’s barely more than a week left in 2024. As we look toward 2025, I can’t help thinking about what I didn’t quite finish this year. (Yes, even professional organizers fall short of our sometimes-lofty goals.)
THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT: WAITERS AND THE CUSTOMERS WHO HAVEN’T PAID
Tasks left un-done scratch at the brain. There’s even a name for it — the Zeigarnik Effect.
As the theory of this phenomenon goes, people remember tasks that are unfinished or interrupted better than the ones they complete. Initially, psychologist Kurt Lewin recognized that waiters had clearer recollections of the orders of patrons who hadn’t yet paid for their orders. Once everyone paid, the waiters basically wiped their brains and couldn’t recall the details of the orders anymore.
This is why I am always so dubious of Law & Order episodes when the police track down a suspect by credit card order to pump the bartender or waiter for details. Invariably, although paid (and ostensibly tipped), servers seem to still remember all the details. Yet somehow these Manhattan waiters remember not only the patrons’ orders but what their dates looked like and the basics of the conversations they were having? Is the world of Dick Wolf a Zeigarnik-free zone?
But I digress.
The central concept of the Zeigarnik Effect is that once you start a task, there’s a “task-specific tension” created in the brain which keeps the task active. Basically, when you start something but don’t finish it, it’s like it’s still on the burner on the stove, and (assuming you’re not distracted by other things you’ve started), that tension pushes you to work on the task. Get interrupted again? The tension persists.
Once you actually do finish the work, the tension is relieved. Keeping that continuous tension up — having the task pop to the top of your To-Do list, putting a sticky note on your steering wheel, etc. — keeps the essentials of the task accessible to the part of your brain that says, “Damn, I really have to work on that!”
(Usually, men get the credit for women’s work, but in a striking rarity, the effect is named not for Lewin, but for Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who continued the line of research of her friend and mentor, Lewin.)
The Zeigarnik Effect keeps unfinished tasks sticky in the brain and work in several ways to get you across the finish line. Unfinished tasks can prompt you to finish them by acting on your brain in the following capacities. They:
- Serve as Mental Reminders — You naturally keep remembering things you started but haven’t finished doing. The unfinished tasks stay top-of-mind, prompting your brain to say, “Hey, you got interrupted (or got bored and wandered away) but this thing is still here! Don’t forget about it!”
Wooden Brown Scrabble Tiles Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels
- Boost Motivation — The next time you curse your brain for reminding you of an unfinished tasks, give yourself a little slack. This mental tension can increase your drive and magnify your focus to resolve those icky, lingering tasks. Sometimes, that motivation may just be, “Dang, I don’t want to be reminded of this again!” but that’s motivation in its own right.
- Build Momentum — My clients hear me say this all the time, but “Small victories breed success.” Even — and sometimes especially — when you take action on the tiniest of unfinished tasks, it can create a domino effect. Have you ever noticed that when you knock something off your list, particularly something that’s been hanging out there a little too long, it gives you the push to tackle more and larger tasks?
- Give You the Satisfaction of Closure — That “whoohoo!” you get from finishing something? It can make you feel like a bit of a superhero. It can work magic. That relief you get when something is no longer hanging over you frees up mental energy so you can set (and tackle) new goals.
Sidebar on the Zeigarnik Effect and ADHD
Of course, the Zeigarnik Effect is just a typical psychological phenomenon and may not hold up under all circumstances. For example, if you’re undergoing a lot of stress, whether at work, or due to illness, or an upheaval in your relationship, an unfinished task that has nothing tangible or digital bringing your attention back to it may just, in effect, escape your brain and fall out of your ears.
When I started to write this post, I wondered whether anyone had researched the relationship between the Zeigarnik Effect and the experiences of individuals with ADHD. They have, but it turns out some of my initial instincts were wrong.
Since the Zeigarnik Effect says that that people remember incomplete tasks better than completed ones, I figured that people with ADHD might have so many simultaneous thoughts and unfinished tasks that newer unfinished tasks would push older ones off the burner. Nope. Or at least, not always.
Actually, the research shows that there’s sometimes a heightened sense of unfinished task recall in individuals with ADHD. Even with all my professional work with organizing clients who have ADHD, I still figured they’d forget more of their unfinished tasks. In actuality, the research shows that the brains of people with ADHD often keep unfinished tasks active, which has just as problematic an effect as forgetting — it increases mental clutter.
So, it’s a good news/bad news situation. The Zeigarnik Effect isn’t making people with ADHD forget their not-yet-completed tasks; it’s just filling their brains with a lot of blinking lights about those tasks. And that “mental tension” that’s supposed to be good for remembering creates real, human tension (that is, stress), that hurts productivity. Ouch.
Luckily, research also indicates that planning is a particularly effective mitigation strategy for reducing the stressful aspects of the “mental tension” of the Zeigarnik Effect. According to Harnessing Two Horsemen of Productivity Havoc, the kind of detailed planning we talk about here at Paper Doll HQ all the time really helps.
Florida State University researchers found that when people with ADHD were allowed to create their own super-specific plans for completing their unfinished projects, the distracting Zeigarnik-esque thoughts went poof! As we talk about here all the time, planning is powerful; it frees up your mental resources and quiets all those Zeigarnik beeps and boops in your brain reminding you of what needs to get done.
But there’s a hitch. I suspect it works for people for ADHD much like it works for those of us without ADHD (especially when we’re overwhelmed), which goes back to why we’ve got unfinished business at the end of the year.
The Zeigarnik Effect has our brains full of stuff we have yet to finish. So we look at when the thing has to be completed, and think, “Aha, I’ll make a plan to attack it.” The problem is that, too often, we either see no deadline (so we don’t feel any pressure to complete a task) or we see a deadline far on the horizon — perhaps several weeks out — and our brain convinces us that it’s easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy, we have plenty of time, and we procrastinate. Oops.
So, be sure to embrace the advice in Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination when planning your attack on whatever is incomplete.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t entirely wrong about ADHD and forgetting. In one study on the impact on prospective memory — that is, the ability to remember to perform an intended action in the future — researchers looked at activity-based prospective memory in people with ADHD found that the Zeigarnik Effect can influence how unfinished tasks or “intentions” remain active in memory.
Their findings suggests that the ADHD brain sometimes puts uncompleted tasks in a state of “suspended activation,” which can adversely impact task recall and completion upon waking up. (This points to the idea that if your unfinished task is going to remain unfinished overnight, you’re going to need more support than if you just have to remember to take the pot off the stove in the next five minutes.)
For what it’s worth, whether you have ADHD or not, research shows that intentionally starting a task, even for the briefest bit of time, can increase the likelihood of returning to the task again and completing it.
ZEIGARNIK YOURSELF INTO FINISHING THE LINGERING TASKS
We can’t finish everything.
Finish Line Photo by RUN 4 FFWPU
I know, that’s a shocking comment on someone who comes here each week to tell you how to organize and be productive, but it’s the truth. It’s why I don’t believe in Inbox: Zero, or Laundry Basket: Zero, or any other Task:Zero mentality.
Seriously, the email, like the laundry, keeps coming. Unless your family members are all about to become nudists, the laundry will always be piling up, and while you can try to keep up with it, like all those inbound emails, when it comes down to it, email and laundry aren’t why you are here on this planet.
Finish what you can, and what you must, and get on living your life. The goal is to have more time to focus on what matters most to you, not to have the emptiest in-boxes.
As we head into the final week of the year, I encourage you to finish up as many of the small, hanging-on tasks you can, just so you can go into the new year unencumbered and more revved up for the tasks and projects about which you feel passionate.
- Make a list — Santa isn’t the only one who is busy making lists and checking them twice. Grab a pad of paper or your phone (because you’ll want to be mobile) and walk around your house (and if applicable, your office) and make a list of all of your unfinished tasks and projects. The Zeigarnik Effect means that a bunch of these tasks are in your brain already, or at the periphery of your focused thought, but some tasks may have edged others off the front burners. Write them all down.
- Delete what doesn’t matter anymore — I know, this feels like failure. But it’s not. Before you can really prioritize what matters, you have to let go of the things that really don’t matter anymore. It doesn’t mean those things never mattered (though they might not have), just that dragging them around with you is doing yourself a disservice.
If it’s been three months since your friend’s birthday, give up the belief that you’re going to time-travel back and send her the perfect card. Forgive yourself (as she’d forgive you) and send her a New Year’s card with all the good gossip about why your life has you so frazzled. You remembered her birthday is September 20th. You just forgot that September 20th was September 20th when September 20th came around.
If there was a grant you were going to apply for, but the deadline has passed, or a work opportunity that you never quite got things together to pursue, forgive yourself and move on. The universe will present new opportunities. Not all unfinished tasks have to be finished. Focus on the ones that shine a light on what fits your values and goals in your life and at work.
- Break down the list into smaller component pieces. — You’ve heard this before: projects are not tasks. You can’t DO a project. Divide every item on your list into small, actionable tasks. This will reduce your sense of overwhelm, making it easier to start…and then to finish.
- Identify your priorities — Let’s face it, some lingering tasks are more vital than others, and the amount of time they take to accomplish isn’t always the key factor.
There are big things you may not have finished. There are small ones, too. Spend one 25-minute Pomodoro to see how they rank. It’s OK to revise your priorities. You don’t have to create a list of 72 ranked items, but get a highlighter and pick out what will give you the most bang for your buck.
If you started it and still value it, see the next bullet. If you didn’t tackle it at all but want to keep it on your list, dig a little deeper and define what the obstacles have been so you can tackle the tasks with awareness.
What are the most important ones to start so you can finish? Do those first!
- Commit to a time and place for taking action — Someday is not a day on the calendar. If you don’t schedule when you’re going to work on a task, you’re not going to start working on that task.
This is where time blocking comes in handy. You don’t have to schedule working on that 2024 bookkeeping task for 3:15 p.m. this Thursday. But if you have a block for doing financial tasks every Thursday afternoon, it’ll be easy to slot that bookkeeping into a cozy spot on your schedule. Revisit my past posts on time blocking to get thinking about the kinds of blocks you need to tackle your overhanging tasks:
Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity
Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done
Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022
Highlights from the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit
I have previously written a lot about activation energy and its importance in getting you over the hump when motivation isn’t doing the trick. William James had a nifty quote about this, too:
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
We can’t wait to be inspired. Sometimes, we just have to take out the trash, replace the light bulb, or call to complain about a mistake on the bill, whether we feel like it or not. But it’s easier to do if there’s a slot on the calendar for household care or dealing with problems.
- Celebrate every win — There’s a reason why so many of us write down things we’ve already done on our task list for the day, just so we can check them off. Having done something, and particularly something that’s been hanging over us for a while, is an accomplishment.
Acknowledge each and every completed task. It will reinforce your sense of satisfaction and motivate you to keep taking action. Nobody is saying you have to shout it from the rafters (though that would be cool), but perhaps go out for a nice meal to celebrate and see if you can spot a server doing a great job remembering all the orders.
Once you have it on your schedule, give some thought to where you’ll work on this task. Find the right environment, or create a virtual one to get you in the mood. I’m already tickled to use this 12-hour Gilmore Girls-themed video so I can finish my tasks at Luke’s Diner in Stars Hollow.
You might prefer a Yule Log video like the ones that used to run on television on Christmas Day. Youtube is full of them, and there’s even a playlist of the best. But if you’d like to feel like someone is cozily keeping you company while you check items off your list, perhaps Nick Offerman’s ten-hour Yule Log might be the way to go.
FINISHING UP
In James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter from Thursday, November 14, 2024, I was introduced to Emily Dickinson’s poem Forever – is composed of Nows – (690), on the power of the moment.
Take advantage of the upcoming moments in the quiet lull between now and the end of the year. Use these moments to get started. You don’t have to DO THE THING, but you can plan to do the thing.
You don’t have to rebalance your financial portfolio to make your retirement more accessible. But you can call and make an appointment with your financial planner, or with a certified financial planner if you don’t already have one. (And hey, my colleagues at Eddy & Schein Group have even put together some guidance on Wrapping Up Year-End Personal Financial Affairs regarding with whom you should be speaking, and about what, in terms of your money life.)
Perhaps your hanging-on task is spending down your flexible spending account (FSA). If your employer permits it, you can carry over up to $640 of unused funds from 2024 into 2025, but why not get your goodies, now? You set aside money, pre-tax, for healthcare stuff; don’t let it go to waste because you forgot to check what you could buy. Look up how much you’ve got left in your account, and then Google your options. For example, Yahoo Tech has 35 Surprising Things You Can Buy with Your FSA Money. (Seriously, did you know you could buy an Oura ring with your FSA?)
You were supposed to pick a new dentist or doctor or schedule that mammogram but just never found the time? OK, don’t kick yourself. But look at your insurance website or app to find out who is in-network, and schedule. (Well, yes, you’ll then sit on hold for a bit before you get to sync up your nifty 2025 calendar with a provider’s schedule. But it’s not going to take as much time as learning calculus. For what it’s worth, I learned just enough to pass the class in college and then, Zeigarnik-style, let all that unnecessary knowledge fall out of my head. You will not be shocked to know that it’s all been OK.)
Go through the unanswered emails in your inbox and send replies, even if the reply just says, “The year got away from me, but I appreciate you contacting me about [whatever], and if it’s still something you want to discuss, let’s get on each other’s calendar’s for late January.” Or you can say “nope, but thanks anyway.” Whatever you do, you’ll feel like you moved forward.
Make a list, chuck the tasks that no longer really matter, pick the ones that will be most satisfying (emotionally, financially, or practically) to complete, schedule time to do them, and give yourself a resounding “HUZZAH!” And if you could use a little accountability, feel free to share in the comments section: what overhanging task might you complete in the next week?
Paper Doll Post:
Whoopsie! What To Do When Your Week Doesn’t Go As Planned
This isn’t the post I planned to write today.
And last week’s post never got written. In fact, last week did not go as planned at all. It went BOOM!
VERTIGO, BUT WITHOUT JIMMY STEWART
It all started last Sunday evening. I was chatting on the phone with a friend and getting ready to start writing a post for Janet Barclay’s excellent monthly Organizing and Productivity Blog Carnival. Usually I submit a post from the Paper Doll vault, but this time I wanted to write a new post, specifically for the carnival. (We’ll get to that later.)
As my friend and I were talking, I sat on the edge of the bed and then lay down to stretch my back. Immediately, I was overcome with a powerful sense of vertigo — not mere dizziness, or as though the room were spinning, but as though I weighed tons and was going to go barreling through the Earth. While it was not the worst I’ve felt in my entire life, it would rank in the top three.
Publicity Poster from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo
I’ve had benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) twice before, and both times it was quickly dispatched by a seemingly magical series of movements called the Epley Maneuver. I’ve seen it be such a freaking miracle that I’m a typical explanatory video in this post. (Think of it as organizing for the inner ear!)
Unfortunately, this time, Epley let me down.
The next six hours seemed to pass like jump-takes in a movie. It was 6:35 p.m. and I was on the phone with Paper Mommy. The next thing I knew, it was almost an hour later. And then another hour. My insurance company has Teladoc built-in, and I’d previously registered, so I used the app to reach a physician for a video consult.
As a professional organizer, here’s how I thought it should work: I register for everything in advance (which I had). I click the button and provide my reason for seeking an appointment (which I did). And then I’d be connected with a medical professional.
Nope.
Although I registered for Teladoc when it first became available, I still had to try to type/dictate my medical history, all while lying flat on the floor and spinning. And I had to provide the address and phone number of my pharmacy…which was written on my prescription bottles…in the other room. (Crawling was agonizing. Have you ever seen someone try to do the backstroke on plush carpet? It was not pretty.)
After all that, I got a message saying someone would be with me within ten minutes. Then a message saying that {name redacted} was reading my file. Then a message saying, “Oops, sorry, we’ve canceled your video appointment. If you still need help, please try to schedule another Teladoc appointment.” Seriously?!
As I went through the entire process again, I noted the clock on my phone. I’d have sworn only minutes had passed, but almost another hour had gone by.
I’ll spare you readers the sordid medical details, but by the time I finally spoke to a Teladoc physician, I was instructed to call 911. When I asked why, the response was troubling enough that I only asked if someone could just take me to the ER.
I live upstairs. The prospects of having to go downstairs by myself to let first responders in or having them break down my door were equally unpleasant. Instead, I called my local bestie, Jen, to see if her husband could stay with her kids, and she immediately headed over to take me to the emergency room.
Moms know everything! She arrived with all sorts of Mom Emergency Paraphernalia, including an old-fashioned ice pack.
While waiting for the Teladoc appointment, I’d voice-texted to tell my Jen what was going on, and I said that the symptoms were giving me a panic attack. She said that if I could get to the freezer, to grab an ice pack and hold it against my chest. (I briefly recalled that I’d seen a TikTok explaining that if you were with someone having a panic attack, you should grab a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer and hand it to them. The cold apparently short-circuits the symptoms of a panic attack.)
Although the panic was secondary to the rollicking vertigo and related symptoms, Paper Doll offers a full-service blog atmosphere, so may I also share this advice from Valera Health’s Mastering the Art of Panic Attack Prevention: From Panic to Peace (bolded emphasis is mine):
The keywords here are ice and sweets. If you’re able to, grab a cold washcloth, water bottle or ice cube and rub it on your face. Panic attacks can induce hot flashes so cold stimuli may help you to cool down and calm down, which in turn can shorten panic attacks and make them more bearable. Another way to try this type of sensory grounding is to quickly dunk your head or face under cold water (make sure the water isn’t too freezing first!).
Some people prefer to do the “sour candy trick” instead by sucking on a super sour candy when feeling panicked. The tart taste helps with refocusing and shifting attention away from the symptoms of a panic attack. If you’re prone to panic attacks, we recommend carrying sour candy around whenever you’re out and about so you always have them handy, just in case.
MAKING SENSE IN THE AFTERMATH OF AN EMERGENCY
Once the emergency, itself, is over, you’re left mopping up the mess. Dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster or a medical situation is usually more problematic than coping with your schedule, but eventually, you’re going to have to turn your eyes to the smoking piles of debris that used to be your carefully planned schedule.
You may not be able to do much right away. I collapsed into bed as soon as I got home from the ER. Though the meds they’d given me had me sleepy while there, my brain was spinning almost as much as the room had been. I had SO MUCH planned for the week prior to Thanksgiving. How would I get back on track?
The following are some of the concepts I put into practice. Whether you have a family emergency or just something that keeps you down for the count, these ideas should be useful until you can see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Assess the Damage
Whether you’ve taken to your bed with the flu or a tree has toppled across your driveway (as happened to so many after this hurricane season), you can’t take action right away. But when you do have a sane, cogent moment to breathe, grab your calendar and your To Do list, and either a pad and pen or a blank Word doc or Evernote note.
Don’t be listless! Take a moment to list everything in your schedule that was disrupted (or will be disrupted).
That first morning was a Monday. Normally I would have completed the weekly Paper Doll post on Sunday night and spent the day doing marketing tasks, sharing my post and those of my organizing colleagues. Again, I hadn’t written the post, which I’d intended to submit to the blog carnival, but even if I had, dragging myself to the computer and lifting my head to the screen was a non-starter. But the world wasn’t going to end because my post hadn’t shown up in someone’s mailbox or social media feed.
Later that day, I had an appointment to get my hair cut, and had blocked time to prepare for guesting on Frank Buck’s Get Organized! podcast on Tuesday.
Tuesday’s schedule included the podcast recording, a first-time physical therapy appointment, a two-hour co-writing session, and two webinars I’d planned to attend.
As the week went on, I had client sessions, prospect consultations, and the variety of life activities (bill-paying, shopping, preparing for this week’s Thanksgiving adventures) that everyone has.
In addition, I had to figure out how (when the world was still spinning, though at a slightly less malevolent pace) to get my prescriptions filled and talk to my own physician regarding some things I suspected I’d need beyond what the ER had advised.
When I floated up into consciousness on Monday, at least I knew what was on my plate.
Prioritize Key Activities
In Use the Rule of 3 to Improve Your Productivity (which I invite you to read and embrace with all your heart and soul and calendar), I reviewed all the ways to manage your schedule and To Do list to keep life from getting in the way. But, as with my week last week, sometimes life is a giant elephant and you have no choice but to let it get in the way.
In that post (and further, near the end of Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity) I explained that when you’re overwhelmed, a great way to prioritize what you have to get done (and how and when to do it) is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
The Eisenhower Matrix gives you the opportunity to graph each task from your brain-dumped list to identify where it falls along a continuum of importance and urgency.
In a typical week of my schedule, what’s important is anything that brings in money, protects from “danger” (whether that’s a late fee or something more problematic), or directly impacts someone else. What’s urgent is anything that is time-specific in the short-term.
Identify What to Do, Decide (and Delay), Delegate, or Delete
Do
As I looked at the tasks, I realized that while my hair cut was not important, it was urgent to cancel so that my stylist would not be inconvenienced by a no-show. The podcast recording on Tuesday would have been both important (to me and to Frank) and urgent. And I had to arrange to get my prescriptions filled, as it turned out that one medication required me to be present at the pharmacy; it couldn’t be filled in absentia.
I sent two texts (to my stylist and to Frank) and arranged to get my prescriptions filled.
Decide
At this point, my wobbly brain decided that I could delay considering anything else until after more sleep. I didn’t know if I’d be able to go to my physical therapy appointment on Tuesday or my client on Wednesday, but I let that be Tuesday Julie’s responsibility. I crawled back in bed.
Delegate
I didn’t really have anything to delegate. I did, however, let my friend and colleague Hazel Thornton know what was going on in case I did not show up to our Tuesday co-writing session or a regularly scheduled Friday night Zoom.
I get it. Delegating is hard. Sometimes, it involves asking for a favor, and most of us are loathe to presume upon others or to seem as though we aren’t operating at 100%.
But delegating — whether it involves asking a friend to take you to the emergency room or trusting your spouse to take care of family responsibilities even if they won’t get done the way you would do them or giving the nod to an employee to handle something you would normally do yourself — is essential.
We can’t do everything. Even if we could, we shouldn’t. Leaning on others — respectfully — strengthens all of our human bonds.
This is my friend Jen, who rescued me. We’re afternoon tea buddies.
Sometime in the mid-1970s, I had a big event happening in third grade. I think I was giving a presentation, or maybe getting an award. Parents were going to be in attendance. But when I woke up that morning, my father told me that Paper Mommy had fallen and cracked her ribs during the night and would not be coming to school. I’m not sure how she managed it in those scant daylight moments before I woke up, but Paper Mommy had already arranged for my sister (eleven years my senior and attending college locally, living in the dorms) to be my plus-one at this event.
If she could have been there, she would have. That’s how Paper Mommy rolls. But she made sure that my eight-year-old self felt loved and valued without schlepping her wounded self to a ridiculous elementary school event. My sister rocked it!
Delete
My plan had originally been to write last week’s post about children’s books on organizing and productivity, and I would have included a link to Paper Doll Interviews Melissa Gratias, Author of Seraphina Does Everything! and talked about both my favorite books in these categories, as well as a few surprises from my childhood bookshelf.
I forgave myself for not writing the post and deleted it from my sense of self-obligation. By the time I left the emergency room, I told myself I could just submit some other post I’d previously written about organizing and productivity books.
For example, I could have submitted Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources, which referenced Hazel’s What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy and reviewed her Go With the Flow! The Clutter Flow Chart Workbook.
That post also reviewed Kara Cutruzzula’s Do It Today: An Encouragement Journal, and Ellen Faye‘s Productivity for How You’re Wired: Better Work. Better Life.
I could have submitted Paper Doll Introduces 5 New and Noteworthy Books By Professional Organizers, which reviewed:
- Emotional Labor: Why A Woman’s Work Is Never Done by Dr. Regina F. Lark, Ph.D, CPO® and Judith Kolberg
- Organizing and Big Scary Goals: Working with Discomfort and Doubt to Create Real Life Order by Sara S. Skillen
- Filled Up and Overflowing: What to Do When Life Events, Chronic Disorganization, or Hoarding Go Overboard by Diane Quintana, CPO®, CPO-CD® and Jonda Beattie, M. Ed.
- Mind Body Kitchen: Transform You & Your Kitchen for a Healthier Lifestyle by Stacey Crew
- Perfectly Arranged by Liana George
I could even have have bent the rules and submitted a link to the Book page at Best Results Organizing where I list my favorite organizing and productivity books.
Sigh.
But in the end, I slept through most of the ensuing days and missed the deadline to submit anything at all (likely disappointing nobody but myself). And sometimes, just as we have to tell ourselves that it’s OK to delegate, we have to accept that it’s OK to delete things from our task list.
Although I bowed out of Janet’s The Best Organizing and Productivity Books – Productivity & Organizing Blog Carnival, twelve of my colleagues had great submissions, and I hope you’ll read them. And Sabrina Quairoli wrote a post called Children’s Books About Organizing Their Lives! Although it’s different from what I would have written (or may still eventually write), knowing that topic is out there in the world made it easier to delete this from my list.
Create a Realistic Recovery Plan
Before I was a professional organizer, I was a television program director. Partially because of my Type A personality and partially because the television industry eats people and spits them out, being realistic about what you could get done in a day wasn’t actually realistic.
We were expected to be able to do everything, at any moment. After two days out with the flu, I once almost passed out in the hall and ended up just working on the cold floor where there was nowhere to fall.
That’s wackadoodle.
Nowadays, I teach clients to break down their tasks into manageable steps and schedule them across the upcoming days or weeks to avoid overwhelm.
When your week has been blown to smithereens, you absolutely have to be realistic. Sometimes (OK, often), that means being prepared to change direction more than once. When Tuesday hit, I felt worse (until my doctor called in that additional prescription). I revisited everything on my list, and applied the Eisenhower Decision Matrix again.
I decided to not do anything on Tuesday beyond rescheduling that physical therapy appointment to the end of the week and canceling client sessions. Y’know what? The nice physical therapist was glad I was taking care of myself, and rebooked me without a fee. My sweet Wednesday client was soothingly concerned and called to see if her adult daughter could bring me any groceries when she’d be in my neighborhood.
Everything that I tell my clients — that it’s OK to stop and take care of yourself, and that people will generally understand — was true.
Remember to Communicate
Once you evaluate your priorities and figure out what you have to delay, delegate, or delete, make sure you communicate the essentials to the people who can make your life easier, as long as they know what’s going on. That may be family members, friends, colleagues, or team members.
Set realistic expectations, ask for help where and when you can, and just keep them updated on delays. At some point later, you’ll want to renegotiate deadlines, but until you’re feeling clear-headed and calm, you won’t really know what will fit where on your calendar.
Be Flexible with Replacement Dates
Whatever “whoopsie” of a week you’re trying to recover from, it won’t help to triple-stack the next week. Don’t try to overcompensate and “make up for lost time” — you’ll burn out.
Just as we always discuss when talking about time blocking, set aside blocks of unscheduled time in future weeks to catch up. But don’t fill every block of time. You need buffer time and breathing space.
Reflect On What You Might Do Differently Next Time
We always learn more from our mistakes and kerfuffles than we do from our successes. If your week gets blown up by an unanticipated event, use it as a learning experience.
Block a little time on your schedule for the next week to evaluate how you handled the disruption. Consider what kinds of changes, contingency plans, emergency backup, etc., you might put in place to make next time (and there’s always some kind of “next time”) into a softer landing.
Give Yourself Grace
Julie circa 1999 would have tried to show up for work the next day, and attempting to barrel through every task, even while dizzily wobbling into colleagues and walls and copy machines.
Julie circa 2024 made sure that nobody was left in the dark, didn’t over-apologize, and got about 18 hours of sleep each day for most of a week. And everything turned out fine.
Appreciate Normal Weeks
When my sister was in college, she had a poster of the poem Normal Day by Mary Jean Irion, founder of the Writers’ Center at Chautauqua Institution. Eleven years later, I rescued it from the basement and put it up in my own dorm room. I hope it will help you appreciate the weeks where, even when nothing goes perfectly, it’s all mostly OK.
Readers, I hope you all have a safe, healthy, and happy Thanksgiving!
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