copperbadge:

Well, it was either that or fall apart, like, my back was pretty much up against the wall. I was carrying a full courseload, working part-time, and after my first semester also putting in hours at the theatre for my major. And I was suffering from pretty much constant, ongoing depression, which I was aware of but wasn’t handling super well. So something had to shift, and fortunately for me, it was a positive shift. 

That said, I didn’t sit down and say “I’m gonna get organized, I’m gonna do the thing”. At most, I was dimly aware that if I didn’t make a list I would forget half of what was on it, and that EVERYTHING was more of a struggle when things weren’t written down. For example, it’s easy to call the doctor and make an appointment if you have the doctor’s name and phone number in a specific place you can get to easily. Otherwise it’s like fifteen steps and then you have to actually make the call and oh my god I can’t even. 

So I started making sure that whenever there was information on my radar I might need, I wrote it down and put it somewhere specific that I could get to easily. It took a lot of training, and it took a lot of trial and error to find out what worked. Like: keeping a notebook where I journal all my doctor’s appointments? Does not work, I kept losing or forgetting the journal. Keeping a spreadsheet on my computer? For some reason that worked despite being no less actual labor. (I also have things like a master spreadsheet of all the sites I have logins on, the email address associated with them, the login name, and the password. Jesus it took forever to build but now it’s easy to just add one in when I make a new one; I even have tabs for different kinds, like “social media” and “medical/insurance” and “travel/entertainment”. It’s a password-protected file that lives on a flash drive that goes everywhere with me.) 

The way I started using a calendar is actually hilarious. A friend of mine, for my birthday (at the start of the sophomore school year) gave me a Buffy The Vampire Slayer weekly calendar as a joke. I bonded with that motherfucker, I wrote down EVERYTHING in it; whenever I got a syllabus I immediately copied everything into the calendar and often I copied it in a week ahead of the actual date so that I’d have warning. Over the years this evolved from a “ridiculous weekly calendar” (Buffy, then vintage Spam ads, then vintage pinup girls for senior year) to a Levenger system with a monthly calendar in the front and daily calendar behind it, to my current system of a monthly calendar in google docs (made from an altered spreadsheet). I kept tweaking what worked and improving and improving until I found a functional system, one I’ve used for the last four or five years now. 

So here’s the thing: the absolute necessity for all of this to function is to find a records system that functions for you. Not really something I can give you – not something anyone can give you. Full organizational systems rarely work for anyone, and it always feels like failing when you only use part of any given system, which is why most people try to adopt a system and end up reverting. But the vital part of organizing your life is to steal the bits that work, discard those that don’t, and slowly mold it into a whole.

Why do spreadsheets and Google Tasks work for me? Who the fuck knows. They’re not the most efficient, for sure, though they are usually the most accessible. The main reason I use Google Tasks is that if shit is written down, I’m at a point where I check Tasks by muscle memory. So I know I’ll see whatever task it is I need to remember to do. I don’t have to keep it in my mind, and my anxiety drops way down if I know I don’t have to work to remember something important. Why do I have a folder labeled “LIFE SKILLS” that has nested folders for insurance and housing and taxes? Because that’s how my brain works. I use that TAXES folder literally one month out of the year, but when I do, I know right where to go and what to do with it. I now obsessively label files (like PDFs of medical bills) with the date and what they really are, because otherwise I’ll never find them and I’ll give up and fail and cry. Or at the very least turn in my medical insurance paperwork very late. 

So the best I can recommend is every time you struggle with something, stop and think, how can I make this easier for me the next time I have to do it? (Sometimes this is even easier than doing the thing, so you can set up for next time and THEN do the thing, like easing into it.) Even if it’s just opening a Word document and detailing what you did this time, that helps. After I leave a meeting at work, I decide if I’ll need the notes I took, and then I type them into a word document helpfully labeled 2016 MEETING NOTES. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, but two weeks from now when I need to remember the process we talked about in meeting, it’ll save my bacon. And then I throw out my paper notes, so that they won’t get in the way of me finding paperwork that’s actually important. 

It’s a lot of labor initially, but once you get rolling and find what works, it takes very little effort, because you know where to go and what to do. And since it’s automated, like you just go and do it out of habit, things like depression and procrastination don’t interfere as much. 

So yeah, that’s the advice I have: find what works for you, rather than searching for what should work for you; take the time now to do that little extra bit of work that will mean less later; and allow yourself to be imperfect. My initial attempts worked maybe 50% of the time. It took me at least eight years to build a system that functions 98% of the time, and I’m at peace with never getting that last two percent. And you may never get to 98% – but that’s okay. 50% is better than nothing. 

Organization isn’t a matter of inherent skill or willpower – just a matter of self-examination and experimentation. And it takes time and luck to make it work.