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A few months ago, about the time I stopped posting so much at this blog, I ran into an issue. I had a lot of things to do and could not keep them in my head any more. That was my old method.

I tried a few things to help me out, notebook systems, online systems, software systems. However nothing really worked quite right for me, and I always ended up going to more than one place to find information when I was working and I always had more than one central control panel. I also misunderstood the meaning of the “inbox”.

An inbox is just a catcher. It catches things needing to be put on a list, in with the reference material or trashed. I never made much progress getting things in order until I physically separated my inboxes from my system. One system, multiple inboxes. It is virtually impossible not to have more than one inbox, but I have tried to keep mine cut down to three: email, voicemail and pocket notebook.

These are inboxes emptied daily (you don’t believe that, well I don’t really either) into a system of organizing the data. If there is too much to go through daily, then you just can’t and nothing can change that. First you have slow the streams of data coming into those boxes, in one way or another. Sticking to a regular schedule of going through your inboxes makes you deal with reality seriously.

What I Was Looking For in To Do List Software

Once I figured that out, onto software, which I am in the process of investigating now. As I was looking, I realized I was looking for something more than a GTD system, but I did not want to look at Gantt charts. I have looked at complex project management software before, for about a minute before I uninstalled it.

Yes, I am a geek, but I don’t geek out on being a control freak to the point I need a degree to run the software that just tells me what to do when.

But some of the things I was looking for is listed below:

• Personal Information Manager – I am in control of over 20 active sites of mine and my clients. I need details of various things around all the time that don’t disappear when the task is done.
• Some Sort of Time Tracking Element – I am looking for software here. If I have to type “2 hours” into a note type field, it sorts of defeats the purpose of using software and not just a test document to begin with.
• Hierarchy – I have my projects, client projects and day job projects. I need to see tasks from one, all or some using folders or filters.
• Free – This post came about because I actually bought software that was close to what I was looking for, put all my information in it, discover it was buggy, decided I could work around it and watching it lose all of my notes last night.  So I am not buying something, unless it is 100% bulletproof.
• Not hosted – The cloud may be great, but I have seen the bugs. And it’s not so much trusting my information with someone else, it’s trusting that it will be there exactly when I need it and not a minute later. Nudge, nudge Gmail. And Gmail is not free, so I can be a chooser. Nothing that comes with advertising is.

Plus I am pretty picky and just the wrong color scheme can make me choose another program, so here is the list, filtered by my software prejudices.

The Free To Do List, Personal Information Management, Time Tracking Tools List

• MonkeyGTD – This thing is a html page that runs in your browser, so it is the ultimate in cross platform and portability. It is based off of tiddlywiki. This is what I use now. Javascript can do some amazing stuff.
• GTDTiddlyWiki Plus – Another webpage based GTD system. And just to clear things up, let me say it is not web-based. It is web page based. Download the file, edit it and it saves to itself. Pretty cool and fast.
• d-cubed – Yet another Tiddlywiki based GTD system. They are all available to also be hosted at Tiddlyspot.
• ThinkingRock – This is was close to being a winner during the search. The only thing I didn’t like was loading time and memory usage. I like to leave whatever software I use running so I know what needs done and have all the information I need in one spot.
• Chandler Desktop – A cross platform tool.
• ToDoList – Another free task management tool with a lot of features.
• Freebie Notes – For those of you who like post-its
• Chaos Manager – Nice little Windows tool that looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while but might do the job.
• TreeSheets – A free from information manager. Cross-platform.
• Total Organizer – They also have a pro version that has more features but costs money.
• Unforgiven Organizer – This one actually looks like it has some potential for doing everything I want.
• Whistler’s List – Looks like a great tool specifically set up for freelancers who want to track tasks for multiple clients.
• Kaboom Organizer – Lots of features.
• NeoMem – Another freer form organizer.
• eQit – Another tool.

And for those who want to investigate further, here are some more lists. Believe me, it is endless.

• http://www.mister-wong.com/user/infomaniac/gtd/
• http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/Directory/Tools/pims.html

In the end, I am using MonkeyGTD and am liking wiki’s for keeping information organized.

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Doing one thing at a time. It’s a nice concept and may seem easy, but I guess it depends on how you handle things. I know it works. I know the sense of accomplishment that comes with actually finishing something. But that does not stop me from getting caught in the whirlwind of multitasking.

The computer is a mind trapping machine. I bounce from thought to thought, task to task, until I get about 50 things half done and nothing completed. When I do a lot at once, I make myself look like I am getting a lot of work done. Until I’m done. And then it looks like I delegated to a crack head.

And all it takes is one website loading a bit too long.

Maybe the internet trains me to be this way. Click a button and it’s here and if it’s not, then so what. There are about 400 other things you can do while you wait. It is so hard to just wait.

I always fall for the trap that I can get sales reports done while I write or that I can somehow check email and the comments on my blog at the same exact time. They are short tasks. Instead of choosing one to do first, I jump back and forth and forget things because of it.

There is a big impatience involved. Once a post is written, it is done. Then it is the rush to get it posted. Especially when I have been slacking and missing a day here or a day there. Sloppy.

Forget about deep linking. I can do that next time or go in later and add links. Forget about cleaning up the words. I browsed over it. It’s English.

And even days that I start out good, like today, have a good chance of going south quick if I let them. I am calmly doing one thing now, writing.

Soon I will try to do a couple of things at once. They will be tasks a monkey can do, but that’s where it starts. By afternoon on most days, single tasking is gone. I am going fast from one thing to the next, my brain going like a spinning top. Every now and then I remember to stop and take a breath, for about a minute. Then off I go.

One thing I have learned. Tools are meant to be tools, not task masters. I can set a timer to stay on a task, but I have to listen to it. I can make to do lists, but I first must read them and then follow them.

And here I thought I could get off easy. I have found the issue and it’s me. Always looking for the perfect answer. And that answer, is plain and simple discipline. I manage discipline in other things I do. This one is going to take some work. I need to go digest a few posts from Zen Habits.

I revisit the topic of schedules every so often because schedules are evolving things. The reason why Zen to Done works for me is that it minimizes the importance of the calendar. I do most of this in my free time, using that term very loosely. I do get a scheduled hour and a half every Monday through Thursday, but the other days of the week are pretty much up in the air.

I could set scheduled times to do things on my days off, but I consider that unfair to the rest of the family. But I do try to take one of those nights off and stay up four hours past everyone else. I find that is about the perfect time for me to tackle a medium size workload and feel that I accomplished something when I was done.

Now I don’t know if that’s the right way to do it, but it’s the way I’ve done it and it works for me. Our weekend activities as a family change and there is no way to account for most of these changes except like I said, picking at least one night to stay up late because we do go to bed about the same time every night here.

With that in mind a tradition planner doesn’t work. But there are other reasons. I am really bad at estimating time. Really, really bad. I have yet to learn every twist and turn that some of these projects I take on can take. I actually used a calendar and text message reminder system for a while. It sucked. It just made me feel lazy. I would send myself way too many reminders in a day and eventually I started ignoring them. If I couldn’t estimate the time on one project, how could I estimate 10 in a row. It was a mess.

So until I get better at this, out goes the calendar method except for the fact that I do my regular round of checking ROI of my affiliate sales, write a post that I may have already written the night before in longhand, find blogs to comment on and drag them to Flock‘s WebClipboard as I check Google Reader and go through my Entrecard Inbox. Since I to through this to do list every day before my day job, it was easy to add it as a habit, because I simply tacked it onto something I already had to do that was regularly scheduled.  And that may change with time, as I learn more things and can prioritize better.

As far as everything else goes, I put a few projects on a list that I want to complete and fluctuate the order based on a few different factors, which basically means I pick something and go with it. Sometimes I pick the most important thing and sometimes I pick the easiest depending on the time I have an where I’m at. And I grab whatever time I have available on the weekends. Many of the weekends I post here. Sometimes I don’t.

I know certain things have to be attended to on a regular basis, like a more detailed review of all of my advertising campaigns, site upgrades, and linking campaigns. And some projects are totally new, like the theme for this site. Projects that kill more than one bird with a stone gets more weight. I needed a theme for this site and releasing it to the public would get links back to me, two birds. Some projects are simply research to see if something I think is possible to do actually is.

I was about to say that paying hosting and for domain name renewals might be scheduled but I have made those automatic.

And most of my posts get published around 7 am in the morning, except for the weekend posts like this one, which can be any time.

Maybe I don’t have a good bookkeeping system or maybe affiliate marketing has too many ups and downs to calculate an average or maybe I am just a straight idiot for trying to to this without an accountant, but I need an @money category of lists.

Both Getting Things Done and Zen to Done use lists. They have an @home list, an @errand list and an @ work list. Breaking up your do to lists into categories like this will will help you cut out the B.S. of indecision and give you a list of things that you can do wherever you currently are. You can’t do anything from your @home list when you are @work, so you might as well file that list for a while. You can even make these lists more detailed with an @phone or @email list if you have to handle a lot of phone calls or your inbox gets filled every day.

But what about money. David Allen doesn’t mention it. Leo Babauta doesn’t mention it. Allen does mention a "waiting on" item in a list. So, for a while, I created a whole bunch on new project lists that were all waiting on money. But that just made things more complex. I didn’t need all of these projects in with all my active projects. So I created an @money list.

On this list, I put all projects that are waiting on a financial boost to get going. I started this whole thing on a shoestring. When I made my first $3000 in a month that was after spending a grand total of $25 for hosting that month. I thought it was great to get this type of return. And for a while, that’s how I rolled. I did everything I could myself and kept a tight hold on the checkbook.

Then time started running out. No matter how much time I tried to squeeze out of a day, there wasn’t enough to break the earning plateau I was at. I was spending too much time on time intensive and monotonous tasks. These tasks are better handled by software or by hiring other people. I also started seeing PPC as a way to free up some of the time spent on SEO. And as I put more money into the business, I started seeing more come out of the end.

It is much better to make a decision of what to do next, throw some money at it, and see it through to the end then decide what to do next, spend the next six months getting it done, and wish it would finally end. I am not to this point with everything yet and maybe this post is just a way to stick it in my mind, but from what I have experimented with, it is better to reinvest as much money as you can back into your business.

If you start with nothing, you need an @money list. This list needs to sit above all other lists when you cash your affiliate checks. On it, you put everything you want to spend money on that will actually help your business. Unless you are waiting on your check to make a house payment, reinvest a big chunk of it. The way I see it is that if my family lived on $6000 last month and I made $8000 this month, the excess is going back in. But without a list that I consistently look at and tweak, I may just blow the money on something worthless. So list sits there as a gatekeeper to my cash.

And as far as GTD or ZTD not covering this goes, I don’t worry. Everyone is different. If you don’t tweak a system you are using and make it your own, you will become it’s bitch. Know right away when you have to do something differently and you won’t have to go through weeks of berating yourself because for some reason the system doesn’t work for you. Usually by that time, I give up on the system and go on alone. But if you put the system in it’s place as soon as you can, it will work the way it was meant to work for you.