Get organized

Well, as anyone who knows me well might have predicted, I’ve been doing more of my computer organizing first, rather than the household cleaning I had planned.

(Non Mac-geeks might want to skip the rest of this entry.)

One very good thing about this is that I’ve got my backups running much more frequently, and much more thoroughly.

Organizing-wise, I’ve managed to move all of the remnants of my calendaring, notes and to-dos out of Palm Desktop and into iCal (calendar, active to-do’s) and sidenote (notes, long-term to-dos). I moved all my contacts over to Address Book a couple years ago.

sidenote is a very neat tool that I recommend for all Mac OS X users. It’s basically a notepad (with text formatting) that ‘pops up’ from the side of your screen. It’s off-screen most of the time, but very easy to bring up whenever you want.

There are a number of other new programs I downloaded and installed over the past couple of days. I found most of them through the 43 Folders listings for Mac OS X . Notable are Quicksilver and Frequency (a tool for blog posting, although the more expensive ecto looks to be better).

Before I can organize, I need to clear out The Disaster (formerly known as my apartment). My plan, as I said in the entry for that , is to do that this week. I’m counting on at least a couple – maybe as many as four – solid days for it. That leaves a couple to a few days after for the organizing.

I want to organize all of my paper archives (publications, clippings, notes, lists, accounting, photos , letters, photocopies, etc.). There’s probably at least a solid day of work in sorting out that.

Then there’s setting up an ‘intake’ system so the clutter doesn’t accumulate again. I’ve been reading a book which has what looks like some useful suggestions for this.

Part of all this is, of course, getting my computer organized, too (given its centrality to my life). I want to rework my email, scheduling and contact management as they are all falling down under the stress of my current load (100-200 non-spam email per day).