On the Impact of Organization and the Tools I Use to Stay Sane

One of the most impactful things in my life has turned out to be something I never thought could contribute to someone’s happiness in any meaningful way. The ability to keep myself organized please vital role in my day-to-day life. It allows me focus on the things I love without worrying if there are enough hours in the day or stressing out about remembering to get milk on the way home.

Being organized has allowed me to cut my weekly grocery shopping time down from three hours of crisscrossing the market to one hour of streamlined get-in-get-out effort. It has made sharing information about my work schedule with my team much easier than it used to be. Having these tangible results to look at gives me confidence that, in setting a resolution for the new year, I will be able to succeed in that. In this post I’m going to give you some of the apps and tricks I use to stay organized.

1) Use To-Do Lists to Keep Track

I use To-Do lists in order to record tasks and things I want to look up later (perhaps a colleague recommended a new game or a good book). Having the items written down in a list allows me to approach each item with full attention whenever it has become the highest priority on the list and give it my best effort without worrying about 10 things at once.

I currently use the Reminders app on my iPhone, but before I had an iPhone I was using pencil and paper. Reminders allows me to make a simple list with check boxes like any list app can, and it allows me to assign a priority and time-based reminders to each individual task. Again, pretty common, but the timed reminders is a step above paper. Here’s where Reminders gets awesome: I can associate a reminder with a GPS location. That means that I can associate a reminder with that milk I needed to pick up that will go off when I’m a mile away from the grocery store on the way home so I remember before I drive by it. WE ARE LIVING IN THE FUTURE.

2) Share the Information with People Who Need It

Reminders also allows sharing with other iPhone users so that you can both update the list and see the changes made by the other. I have created grocery lists using this feature so that when we run out of something either of us can add it to the list and the other will see it. When it’s time to grocery shop, the list is already mostly written. This feature can be useful for work tasks as well, if your team has a set of goals to accomplish for a certain project you can keep each other updated between team meetings using a shared list to track the progress you’ve each made.

3) Find the Right Method for Your Madness

As I’m sure is true for many of us, this January marks the start of a new effort to get healthy and lose some weight. The grocery list has helped with that because it reminds us to buy only the things that we need instead of wandering around the grocery store subject to our cravings, but we have also begun tracking calorie intake and physical activity.

Finding the right apps for this has been very difficult, actually. We tried Fooducate and Noom in the past year, but neither really helped with our effort to eat better, and both took a great deal of time. We have finally settled on MyFitnessPal. It allows us to create recipes so that we don’t have to enter each ingredient individually every time we have a meal, saving us at least half an hour in searching each time. The things that make it stand out from similar apps are its integration with iPhone Health to account for our steps taken, integration with activity tracker apps like FitStar, and by far the coolest feature, it shows full nutritional breakdowns for things we eat. Fine-tuning our diet to meet recommended daily values is a breeze when I have the ability to enter whole recipes.

Given that we no longer live in a society where nutrition and healthy eating knowledge and habits are passed down through tradition, this is vital guidance that I have never had in selecting the foods I eat up until now.

4) Know When the Old-Fashioned Way is Best

For some things, an app is just not necessary. I have a reading list for 2015 and it does not show up anywhere in my phone or other gadgets. I have dedicated one shelf in my house to those books. It serves as a visual reminder every time I’m in my living room, as well as a convenient central location from which to pull the next book in the stack. A simple tool, but one I have found to be very effective. Put the things that matter most in regular visual contact so that they cannot fall “out of sight, out of mind,”

While this may not seem like a very extensive list, it serves me well. I have seen many lists online from top CEOs and business gurus that list their top 15 or 20 separate apps they use to stay organized and order their priorities, but I can’t imagine using that many separate programs. I try to keep things simple, and always avoid spending more time than I save using the tools I choose. If it takes more time to use than it saves me, it’s the wrong tool for the job.

What tricks and tools do you use or have you used to stay organized? Did they work for you, or are you still searching?