It is impossible to stay organized without action. If there’s no action on paying bills, the mail will pile up; if theres no action on the laundry, the clothes will pile up; etc. Certain points of compulsion are necessary to ensure that these actions happen.
If the conclusion you are drawing from the combination of this title and this photo, is that your Time Management System is missing Post-It notes, then go ahead and laugh. There’s a little more to it than that, but I stand by my Post-It’s. There are a lot of time management systems out there, both paper and digital, but I have found that NONE of them facilitate prioritizing, especially sudden RE-prioritizing.
Your to-do list isn’t working for you because you are trying to reduce 3 steps to just one. To get your to-do’s to done, requires three essential action steps:
I think I just invented a new word. Com•pel•e•ment |comPELement| (noun) 1 element used to compel one to action. So many organizing efforts are focused on containing items out of sight and out of mind. There are, however, things that we need to make a point of acting on, that should NOT be hidden. Quite the opposite. We need things to stick out like a sore thumb to compel us to action. Those are the compelements. Here are some examples.
Bound and spiral notebooks may make sense for taking notes in school or keeping a journal, but they are terrible for keeping you organized. I have seen thousands of (usually) half-used notebooks in my clients homes and not once have I seen one used as an effective organizing tool. I would add notepads to this list and exclude binders, which can be useful for reference material.
