I’m totally jinxing myself by saying this “out loud,” but… I feel like I’m on top of things. It’s been a crazy few weeks. And things are totally fine!

And I think the credit goes to my new organization system.

With pretty much every job I’ve ever had, I’ve found that it’s impossible not to apply things you learn on the job to the rest of your life. I guess one of the things I’ve osmoted (that’s totally a word…shut up!) from working at a tech startup is project management. Because I seem to have developed my very own highly disjointed and fairly manual version of Jira.

I’ve got a working uber to-do list in Reminders called Things on Ambika’s Mind.

This is essentially a brain dump of things I’d like to get done. It tends to be a little pie in the sky (e.g. “Plan Building Stories post”), but they are things that I definitely want to do and don’t have a plan for. I add things to this list as they occur to me and prune the list occasionally. If I have a particularly light week, I’ll look here to see if there’s anything I can use that extra bandwidth for.

Now we get to the real meat. Which means…paper. No matter how hard I try, no matter what tools I try, I can’t seem to get away from a good, old-fashioned notebook.

Each week, I think of what the next seven days are going to look like. I draw out a weekly calendar style view and fill in the dates, days of the week, and whatever plans I know of. I also make a to-do list for the week. Some portion of this list is things that I know I need to do during the next seven days and the remainder is things pulled from Things on Ambika’s Mind. I make use of the bullet journal’s task notation system, e.g. marking completed tasks with “X” and migrated tasks with “>”.

Moving forward, I’m going to be using symbols to mark activities I want to track (such as a “:)” for running) and including irregular but recurring errands (such as “Target run”).

I also came up with something I call a “Daily Map,” which is not unlike doing standup, really. Except that I don’t worry too much about what I got done yesterday and I’m not sharing it with a team (though Nate does end up hearing a lot about the daily maps for the weekend).

I set up some ground rules for the daily map:

The idea is to deliberately and explicitly construct my days. To feel in control of how I spend my time, as opposed to feeling controlled by my task list. To make things feel less overwhelming.

Most Fridays, I spend the bulk of the day in a coffee shop.

This is my disciplined “me” time (“me” time at home seems to always end up with my either blobbing on the sofa, watching television or doing housework). I read; I work on blog posts; I take care of odds and ends. And I make week layouts and daily maps and migrate tasks and other things related to keeping track of everything that’s going on. It’s basically like a one-person planning meeting. And when life doesn’t let me have my coffee shop Fridays, I make sure to set some other chunk of time aside to lay out the week ahead. My weeks may not always have the same starting points, but I’ve been pretty good planning for the week ahead in roughly seven day intervals.

The part of this system that I’m still working on is the snapshot/big picture element. Basically, I want a quick visual understanding of my life in the near term. We’re managing with a calendar on the fridge for now.

But, really, my life (anyone’s life?) doesn’t break down neatly into calendar periods. Making seven-day plans (above) has addressed the “week” issue, but even with a white-board style month calendar, I find myself needing a bigger picture. Something more like six weeks or two months. I’ve found a few options, so it’s just a matter of testing them out.

What if…what if this turns out to be the key to living my life? What if it’s all smooth sailing from here on out? Just kidding…I’m no fool. If next week doesn’t upend everything, the week after that or the week after that will. Smooth sailing now is no guarantee that the winds will never change. What would the adventure be in that?