Organizing your shit is hard. I don’t mean your physical shit like papers or clothes or books, which I tend to do a pretty good job keeping track of—I’m talking about organizing your ideas.
Organizing my ideas is hard because there’s a lot of things I’m trying to keep track of on any given day, week, month, or year, ranging from big-picture shit like how in God’s name I’m going to get my writing out into the world to little things like remembering to get a haircut. If ideas were physical objects I could see, line up, and sort using a predetermined system, I’d have an easier time dealing with them, but because ideas are non-visual and frustratingly ephemeral, I’m prone to forgetting them or not knowing how to bring them to fruition (lame…).
Writing my goals and tasks down on paper so I can visualize them has been a HUGE help to me over the years—I started keeping schedule books back in 2011 and never looked back. More recently, though, I realized that I was still having trouble keeping track of the dozens, if not HUNDREDS of things I want to do, since on any given day I might be thinking about…
- Prepping for classes at my teaching job
- Writing the following Monday’s blog post
- How to fix a problem in an essay I’m working on
- Picking up a new toothbrush from the corner pharmacy
- Making weekend plans with a friend
- Washing my hands more when I’m at work to avoid excessive little kid germs
- Cool people I could interview for this blog
- Long-term financial goals
…and that’s just a tiny sample. I have a LOT of things to keep track of, and not all of them can be written down and crossed off my To-Do list. Basically, if I wrote down every single one of my long-term goals along with every little thing I was trying to do on a daily basis like wash my hands or floss in the mornings, my To-Do list would be about four pages long every single day.
My friend Jack and countless others use a Bullet Journal system to organize their ideas, but I was looking for something that would better help me see and organize all the little things I’m trying to do without overwhelming me with information. I was also tired of making lists that required me to write my goals down over and over whenever a notebook page got filled and a bunch of things got crossed off, and didn’t want to use cards like my friend Paul does because I didn’t want the ones at the bottom of the stack getting lost.
In short, I needed my own solution to a very specific problem.
Super-huge Japanese-style closets are great for storing clothes, futon bedding, unused furniture, and, it turns out, whiteboards.
An Idea-Organizing Whiteboard Made a Lot of Sense
My Japanese apartment has two deep, two-shelved closets with sliding doors like this one. I was using the smaller one to store my clothes, but the second, bigger one was more of a miscellaneous repository. I liked the idea of writing down my goals and ideas on a whiteboard I could hang inside the bigger closet because I could close the door and keep them out of sight when I didn’t want to think about them. It also made for one less thing to explain to people who dropped by for a visit.
I started by taking measurements and found I had a 99cm x 190cm space to work with inside the closet (remember, Japan uses the metric system!), which seemed like a decent amount. Then I walked down to the local home goods/everything store to see if they sold whiteboards—and while they didn’t have big ones, they did have some smaller ones that would do the job.
The ones I found at the store were surprisingly perfect: I ended up buying six 45cm x 60cm whiteboards in two different styles (everything they had on the shelves) and then carrying them the three-quarters of a mile back to my apartment. This actually worked out better than using one big whiteboard because the edges serve as natural separators for things I’m trying to keep track of and saved me from having to draw a grid that would inadvertently get erased. Then I hung the six whiteboards one on top of the other in a grid:
Four of my six idea-organizing whiteboards with blank category sections.
I used extra-strong double-sided tape to secure the whiteboards by their upper and lower edges, and when this didn’t quite work (d’oh!), a couple of well-placed nails on the closet ceiling and sides did a much better job.
I had an extra desk light I wasn’t using, so I plugged it in, strung the cord inside the closet, and mounted it on top of an extra chair so I could see what I was writing. I left the space in front of the whiteboards empty for easy access, though I also use it to iron my clothes once a week on laundry day.
Photo taken midway through the hanging process with desk lamp and scoring tally board.
In the weeks before I hung the actual whiteboards I’d jotted down 17 different categories I felt best represented the different ideas I was trying to keep track of and sorted them into each category. The 17 categories included areas like Writing, Finances, Japanese Study, Exercise, Social Life, and others that encompass different areas of my life. I laid out three categories per whiteboard, with the final two on the lower left whiteboard since it’s harder to reach from the outside of the closet.
The whiteboards have been the soul of my new organizational system, and I must say that thinking of my goals in terms of categories is helping a LOT, especially when I copy ideas off the board into my To-Do list for more immediate access.
Sample category with score number in red.
How’s My Driving?
I’ll go into detail about my seventeen categories next week, but in addition to listing goals and erasing them as I finish with them, I also wanted a way of judging how well I’m doing on any given week.
Beside each category I put a red box, and inside that red box I put a number from 1 to 10. That number represents how well I’m feeling about that category on any given week. Say one month I saved a lot of money and feel like my financial health is in really good shape—I might raise the Finances category to an 8 or a 9. But, if I haven’t been working on enough writing and feel like I’m not putting forth enough effort on a work in progress, I might move the Writing category down to a 3, a 2, or (dare I say it?) a 1.
The scoring system is an easy way to show me which areas I have to work on: for example, if I look at the board and see a 2 next to Writing, I know I have to work more on Writing so I can move toward a place where I feel more comfortable and confident, which would be the 8 or the 9. Likewise, if I see an 8 or a 9 on the Japanese Study category, I know I’m in a good place and don’t need to spend extra energy cracking the books.
In keeping with my Never Stop Improving mantra, I decided to never give anything on the board a score of 10. While a 10 might be theoretically possible, I can’t imagine any situation where an area of my life might not need any improving at all, and I never want to fall into the trap of thinking that things are as good as they can be.
Total of all 17 whiteboard categories with both the average and the change from the previous tally. I usually re-score each category and do the math one or twice a month.
I had an extra, smaller whiteboard that my predecessor left me, so I hung it on the corner wall to use for averages. Every two weeks or so I step back, reassess the different categories, and then tally up the total, which goes on the smaller board. Then I take the average so I can see how I’m doing as a whole and whether I’m moving forward or straggling in my pace. Depending on the week, this has been serving as either a solid confidence boost or an incentive to get my act together, but more importantly, it’s also helped me realize where I stand, since not having a firm grip on my status was also causing me undue stress.
Conclusion
The whiteboard system has been helping me keep track of the many, many different areas of my life that need organizing and improving. While having a handy place to write down and categorize things has helped free up a tremendous amount of my mental space, the scoring system’s also helped me track what’s going well, and what’s not going so well.
Next week I’ll share the different categories I’ve divided my life into, but for now, I hope you consider how a whiteboard, or a similar system with a notebook, might help you organize your own life goals and help you stay on track. If what you’re doing now is working fine, then congrats! For the rest of us, though, sometimes it pays to try out a new system.
Oh yeah, before you go…
But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook
My Instagram where I post cool pics from Japan