This year has been a great one for me. I have made several
strides in my personal and professional life.
I graduated with my Masters!! Whoop, whoop!!
I also decided to embrace tech to see if it could help
organise my very busy life. I feel like
I’m running 3 concurrent lives! Anyone can tell you that any system you get is
only as good as the information you feed it and honestly, I would much rather
be feeding my kids, some guests or even the dog than feed data into a computer
or some app on my phone. Of course, my attempt to use tech to organise me
failed.
Then I thought to marry old school and new school and put
sticky notes on my screen (not the physical ones), which I did and I felt
really good for having organised my stickies into subjects and listing my to do’s.
9 sticky notes later, I felt pretty
accomplished. Only thing however, was that the app does not have the ability to
strike through or tick, so I decided to put an asterisk (*) at the beginning of
every task I completed. However, an
asterisk usually denotes urgency so every time I look at my stickies, I have
all these ‘urgent’ matters staring at me. Also, sometimes a task changes
slightly and there is no way to really show this on the sticky! Again, my
system failed (and I hated that this obscures my painstakingly chosen background).
Then I had a conversation with a friend and after trying to
unravel the mess of thoughts in my mind, it was clear that I needed something
to off load my thoughts. Somewhere, I could easily add thoughts, refine
thoughts and cross of the items that are done or have become redundant. Where oh where could I get an app like that?
You got it! Who needs an app? I just need to dust off my trusted whiteboard and put it back to use.
Just because technology has come up with some great apps
does not mean I must be tied to them, especially when they don’t work for
me. Just because hoverboards have been
invented (and oh yes aren’t they cool!) doesn’t mean we all have to hop onto
one and zip around the malls. It is OK to walk.
It is OK to plan my life on a whiteboard.
Looking forward to colour coding, underlining, crossing out,
drawing squigglies, circling stuff, creating sub-groups ….
Oh the glee!!
