Image via Wikipedia

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• FastTrack Schedule 10 for Mac ships this fall from AEC Software (tuaw.com)
• Pocket Informant 1.11 for iPhone adds Push Alarms, Auto Sync, and More (themactrack.com)
• WebIS prepares Pocket Informant 9 for Windows Mobile release (downloadsquad.com)
• 12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done (lifehack.org)
• Gantter – The Ultimate Free Creative Project Management Tool (makeuseof.com)
• BKeeney Software presents new enhancements of Task Timer (themactrack.com)

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.

Time is money. It may be something we all agree on, but what does it really mean.

Fixed costs are nice. One of my fixed costs is hosting. When I make $4000 in a month, my hosting is $125. If I triple that, it will still cost me the same and the ROI triples.

On the other hand, PPC advertising moves with the income. If I make more through PPC this month, chances are I spent more too. Yes, I can increase ROI. But for the most part, I have to spend more money to make more. And it doesn’t help that the amount of money I spend on ads is limited by my credit.

Now there are a few campaigns that I currently have running that have not been tweaked for months. But for the most part, I have to babysit. Not much now. But if I were to increase my Adwords spending to the point it replaced all the other sources of income, I would have no time to do anything else and I would be stuck in the same rat race I am trying to remove myself from.

I ran into a similar problem with the direction my blogging was going. A post a day may be recommended for a lot of bloggers. It isn’t going to work for me any more. Don’t get me wrong, I most likely write a post or more a day, but not on every blog. And this blog, which is mainly a journal of my journey makes no real money. And I like it that way for now. I am not looking for money here yet.

Building links is like hosting and social media marketing is like PPC advertising. Both have their place, but my time is limited, so I had to work out a balance.

A link I get to a site today will most likely be there tomorrow, next month, and next year and since I know a little SEO, the traffic results of that link may be less volume than I would expect from a Stumble but the quality of that traffic will be much greater.

Don’t get me wrong. You can’t just build some links and then go take a nap for the rest of the year. But here is what I know. I made $25,000 in the last 12 months from the results of links that were already there. Not John Chow money but it beats being a 24/7 internet hustler.

And all links are not created the same. Some take more time to build. A directory links takes a minute. If you want to release software to promote a site, it’s going to take some time but that time will come back to you once the ball is rolling.

I am writing this post to beat something into my head. I have a weird relationship with money. I spend in the range of $100 in Adwords a day and have to pry my wallet open to buy software and hire people to speed up the link building process. Money spent there will free up time and possibly lower the need for so much advertising. It is basically a fixed cost. Spend the money and see the results for months or even years. You cannot say that for PPC advertising.

This has also forced a weird relationship with time. If I am doing my own grunt work because I refuse to hire someone than I am basically paying myself what I would pay the other guy to do it for me. So if I refuse to pay $10/hour, that is what I am paying myself. If I buy software that speeds up a process, than I am effectively raising my hourly rate. If a job that took 3 hours now only needs my guidance for 20 minutes, I just gave myself a 900% raise for that time period.

It’s a way to look at things and a way to start putting money and time in balance. Hopefully it works.

I’ve been a slacker for a couple of weeks now. The money has been good, so I slowed down. Not here at my blog, but with other projects. It’s a habit I know well and one that has sabotaged me a lot.

I ran into a place where I became comfortable. "Oh, this is nice. I can stop here a while."

The bills are getting paid. There is a little left for savings. We refinanced the house. And all the taxes for last year are going to be paid. I have been paying $300 a month for two years to the IRS. Nice to have that monkey off of my back.

Yesterday, half of the tree in our front yard fell down spreading shrapnel all over the grass. Another bill. And another reason to get off my ass and start working. And another reason we are getting a condo next time. This is my first house and first yard. For our second house, we can borrow a park.

But the comfort zone reason is only one. There is also the fact that I like doing this stuff. I’m curious and have way to many interests. Other people collect Pez dispensers. I collect ideas, throw them together, mix them around and see what comes out.

I know I can do this the way everyone else does. That would be boring. With a little more time, I can create something great. And then I start suffering from feature creep. I can do this. And this. And this will make it that much better.

Of course, nothing has been done up to this point. Only planning. I have planned sites whose notes spread from one legal pad to the second. I look at that and it stops me in my tracks.

The only way to fight that is to scale it down. What is the minimum amount of work I can do to get this idea doing something, instead of sitting on a pad? What is the shortest route to making money with this idea? How many one to four hour chunks of time is this going to take? What potential does this idea have compared to the others that are piling up?

Turn the base idea into reality and then move on to the details.

And I babysit. I wrote software to calculate the ROI of my affiliate sales because I check it so much. I figured it would free up some time. Instead of confronting the problem, I built something that made the time the problem robbed from me shorter.

Self control sucks. Looking at big massive ideas knowing that it would take me months to build or even months of working to pay someone to build for me is tempting. But the gamble is time against money.

Most of my short projects will give quick money for a short time or a slow trickle of money for a longer period. But the big ideas. The big ideas automate things. The big ideas are tiny snowballs rolling down a hill. It takes more time up front to free up more time in the end.

The self control comes in with sticking to the original plan. The three or four things I have going right now. Writing them down daily and not adding extras that just stress me out. Noting new ideas, knowing that they will come back around if they are worth it, and putting them out of my mind. Eventually enough of the small projects will give me a running start at a big one or enough money to pay someone to run for me.

And writing has helped a lot. It smoothes out wrinkles. It instantly exposes bad ideas for what they are and sometimes turn a so-so idea into a much better one. It’s a brain detox. Bad ideas tend to come out first. Once they have had their say, they are done. And then I wait for the good ones to start whispering.

And thank you for being my sounding board.

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.

I carry a Moleskine around to write random ideas down which I later put in a bigger notebook which consist of to do list, article ideas, half finished articles and marketing ideas.

I only recently pulled my head out of my ass and set Firefox up to reopen all the tabs the next time I use it. It has become my instant to do list. No need for notes I can lose. Its all right here.

When I shut down for the day. I just make sure all the tabs that I want open when I turn my computer on, are.

In today’s world of web apps this can be anything. A online bill payment page, Adsense account, BackPack account, Google Reader, Gmail account and the list goes on.

Just seems the easiest thing to do if you like me, spend a lot of the day here, staring at a screen. When I get up in the morning, I have no idea of what I was doing the day before until I’ve downed a few cups of coffee. I forget the habit of checking my lists and stare blanking at whatever opens first. Might at well be a list of what I actually need to do.