Keeping your monthly documents organized

It's important to keep some records: bank statements, bills, tax information, etc.  One can never tell when one will need those documents.  Like most people, I had for most of my life used hanging file folders in an old filing cabinet.  The thing got to be full to bursting, and mostly full of crap.  And the chore of de-cluttering it became so onerous that I just kept putting it off, which only made matters worse.

Then my dad died.  And while I was clearing out the family house, I discovered his way of tracking things, and was surprised to see how effective and efficient it was.  Since I was already in clearing-away-the-crap mode, I took some time to rearrange my own files and apply his approach.  Works like gangbusters.  So I thought I'd share it.



My dad's method is based on two things: using envelopes instead of folders, and distinguishing groups of items by date.  I've tweaked things a bit to accommodate the occasional weird items, but the basics remain.

Simple envelopes go far to stay organized.

I bought 500 No. 10 (i.e. standard business size) envelopes; they're quite cheap, especially in bulk.  Then I keep each year's bills/statements/etc for each source in its own envelope.  One for the phone, another for water, a third for TV, and so on.  I write the source and year on the short edge of each envelope.

I also keep one year's stuff, just in case.  At the end of each year, I toss stuff that's more than a year old.  This takes less than an hour, which is definitely not an onerous chore.  Because of the information involved, I shred the old stuff.  But a fireplace or wood-burning stove works just as well.  Since I keep a year's worth of stuff, I use elastics to pair up last year's and this year's envelopes for each source.

Some organizations use larger envelopes when they send stuff and they just fold the paperwork twice.  And some organizations - like insurance companies - send 'way more paper for even the slightest change than they really should.  That's why I also have the larger brown envelopes.

All these envelopes fit easily in one of my desk drawers, so they're out of the way and I can live free of hanging files and folders.  And it takes, I've found, just a few seconds to track down whatever envelope I need.

Simple cardboard boxes hold the big stuff.

Now, of course this doesn't cover everything.  Some things are just too voluminous to fold up into an envelope.  For those very few things, I just bought a few, thin Kassett cardboard file boxes from Ikea. They have fold-over lids and elastics to keep them closed.  I got them all in black cuz, like, I'm cool.  Those yellow tabs at the bottom of each are 2"x0.5" post-its on which I wrote what stuff goes in that box.  Again, remembering that I now purge old stuff religiously every year, these boxes are big enough to do the job, much safer than hanging files, and more discrete too.

One box is for our new house, another is for financial stuff and insurance, and so on.

How you decide to partition your records is up to you.  I would advise you to keep track of how your using the envelopes for a while.  Take note of situations in which this method is slowing you down or adding to your meta work.  Those would be bad things.  If you notice that this is happening, schedule some time to play around with how you use the envelopes.  Try to identify exactly what it is that's slowing you down, then focus on finding a way to fix it.

All I know is that this envelope trick of my dad's has really been great for me.  Your mileage may vary.

Diigo V5 takes another step forward

On 1 July 2010, Diigo rolled out version 5 of their bookmarking service, and again they've added some pretty useful features.

You can read all the gory details at their blog, but there's two improvements in particular that are especially noteworthy.



The first is their continued work to refine usability.  Diigo has a very usable toolbar for your browser that you can configure to have as few or as many tools as you need.  To this they've really only added one new item, which I'll write about below.  Still, the toolbar is fast and easy - just what one wants to bookmark things without getting distracted.

Also on the usability front, Diigo has refined its website interface, cleaning it up even further.  I've written before about the relative clumsiness of Diigo's interface compared to what I think is the world leader in page layout - Delicious.  With V5, Diigo pretty much pulls up even with Delicious.  The sidebar has moved from the right side to the left, and has been cleaned up even further: the sidebar is basically for tags and finding things - they've moved all the other functions, which would typically be used far less often, down to the footer.

The second major improvement in V5 is the ability to clip portions of pages (as images) and store them in your Diigo library.  Not only that, but you can annotate the image with shapes, arrows, and text.  I would have preferred they actually captured the page content in HTML/XML, but I can see that images are still easier to deal with.

This clipping feature can very useful because if you just save a link to a page - and the page changes over time - you may forget exactly why you'd bookmarked it.  Now you can clip the particular spot that interests you, and refresh your memory about it with annotations.  The new functionality seems to work well, and is as easy to use as the rest of Diigo.

Since I'd've rather had clippings of content and not just snapshots, I'm giving this upgrade just 4 of 5 stars.  But still, Diigo V5 is a definite step forward and well worth looking into.

One way to use Geetasks for the iPhone

In my last post, I reviewed Geetasks, a portable version of Google Tasks for the iPhone, and I promised an example of how one can use Geetasks to organize one's tasks. That's what I'll do now. I should note that there are other iPhone apps that can accommodate this method with few, if any, changes. I'll mention some of them at the end of this post.



Google Tasks and Geetasks are so simple that they impose virtually no structure on how you organize things. This is both a benefit and a problem. It's a benefit because they're very flexible as a result, and able to accommodate a wide assortment of task management systems. It's a problem because users have to take the time to figure out their own way to manage tasks, which is something not everyone wants to undertake (which explains the popularity of websites and services offering complete predefined systems for task management). While I'm the sort of person who likes to work our my own way of doing things, I'm also the sort of person who likes to share those sort of things (which explains why I do what I do). Hence the DFW blog and website.

So here's how I use Geetasks. Your mileage may vary. I note that this method is inspired largely by Mark Forster's AutoFocus system and, to a smaller degree, GTD.

I think of lists as contexts, which are logical groupings of tasks. I created a Geetasks list for each context. Then I created one special list, which I called "Action," that holds the tasks I want to do next.

When using apps as simple as Geetasks, it's important to limit the number of lists you keep. A single long list is as unmanageable as dozens of very short ones, but having multiple lists can make it easier to search for tasks to do next. Since Geetasks doesn't (yet) have an integrated view of multiple lists, I prefer to err on the side of fewer longer lists than many shorter ones. This is why thinking of them as contexts rather than projects (in GTD-speak) makes sense.

Obvious lists include: work, home, personal, and someday - the latter being for storing things that you just want to think about rather than tasks you'll actually have to do anytime soon. You might add extra lists if you have other, particularly intensive projects. For example, we're renovating our house, so I have a separate list just for tasks relating to the reno.

At the start of the day (in my case, usually while I'm riding the subway to work, or while I'm reading the morning paper), I go through each context list, choose tasks I want to do next, and move them to Action. I pay particular attention to tasks that are actually due that day. It's better to do this at the start of the end rather than the night before, so that you can catch any tasks that have due dates of that day.

During the day, I keep working on the Action list. Whenever a new task comes up, I just add it quickly to Action. Since new tasks are added at the top of the list, they're front and centre. If I know I can't get to them, I manually push them down the list, out of the way. If I run out of things to do in Action, I take a few minutes to pull some more items from other lists into Action (or, sometimes, I just take a rest).

Then, at the end of the day, during commercial breaks, or before turning in for the night, I go through the Action list, which now has the day's leftovers in it. For each task, I decide if the task is really worth doing. If it is, and if I want to do it the next day, I just leave it in Action. If I don't expect to do it soon, I move it to some other list, or delete it altogether.

Finally, I make sure I sync Geetasks with Google Tasks at least once a day, preferably first thing in the morning or last thing at night.

While this is a standard pattern for me, I'm not fixed to it. Sometimes, for example, if I'm waiting in line at the supermarket, or in a really boring meeting, I'll take a few minutes to review one list or another. Most of the time, I find nothing that needs tweaking - and then I go back to playing Sudoku. Sometimes, though, I'll find reason to reorder some items or add notes or delete some once-brilliant idea that I now realize is utterly stupid.

The greatest shortcoming of the current version of Geetasks and Google Tasks is that tasks that are overdue or due "now" and not pushed anywhere that will attract my attention. So I have to pay particular attention to make sure those tasks are in the Action list. I'm also disappointed that Google Tasks (and therefore Geetasks) doesn't yet support repeating tasks; still, I find this not more than a minor inconvenience.

I find this process very lightweight and effective. It does take a little more hand-holding than more structured processes like GTD, but it's also far more flexible, which means I have the freedom to explore different ways of staying organized, and adapting to circumstance. And that's just fine by me. Another thing this method does is force me to reflect upon my tasks - and that helps me sort out, in the cognitive background, whether tasks are really worth doing and how they connect together.

Hopefully, it may be helpful to you too.

POSTSCRIPT: I should mention that there are other apps that implement similar functionality to Geetasks.

Voodo is one interesting app that uses tags for everything and has no notion of folder, list, project, or context - you can "fake" them all with tags; and it syncs with Google Calendar. One can easily simulate lists and moving tasks between lists with tags. Voodo's developer says that repeating tasks will be added in a future version.

Toodledo for the iPhone is another useable app because you can hide task fields that you don't care about, so you can strip it down to the bare minimum and get something pretty close to Geetasks. (This particular trick will be the subject of a separate post.) The benefit of Toodledo is that it can provide an integrated view of multiple lists, implements repeating tasks, and supports different and useful ways of ordering tasks. And it syncs with the Toodledo web service. The problem with Toodledo is that it doesn't support subtasks like Geetasks does (unless you get a premiumToodledo account).

Slimtasks is another very nice and simple app. Its interface is perhaps the nicest and most usable of all the simple apps, but it doesn't sync with other services. It would be trivial to adapt the method sketched above to work on Slimtasks. But if your iPhone is damaged or stolen, your tasks are all history.

The very well regarded Things for Mac comes very close to this, with only slightly greater overhead. Things certainly has a better look and feel than Geetasks, but it's not quite as simple to use either. And it can only sync with your desktop version of Things, not with a web service. I find that problematic because web services are universally available whereas your desktop/laptop is not necessarily so.