Chaos is beginning to descend…

Posted on June 23, 2007
Filed Under Deep Thought, Fun on the Web, Web 2.0 stuff, Website Tools |

I think I might have too many drafts sitting on my dashboard. Do I really want to get rid of them? Or should I take some time to finish them off? I also have a reader full of feeds I hardly look at any more. Should I remove them completely or file them away in a ‘not read so often’ folder? I’ve also got a desktop littered with notes (I just use notepad and save it to the desktop rather than have a specific program for it)

This is the beginnings of chaos and entropy, and requires the input of energy to rectify. That’s thermodynamic that is.

I’ve never been the most organised of people, I have however always had a liking for the idea of being organised. Unfortunately organisation is something that generally happens to other people, without them seeming to make any effort.

There are a multitude of solutions out there which claim to make you’re life (online at any rate) more organised, but all the ones I’ve tried need far too much work. Google Calendar, Reader and Mail are very good at what they do but I’m not organised enough (ironically) to set aside the time to learn how to use them more effectively. Take Calendar for instance, for my other writing project I often have to remember dates, whether they’re release dates or announcements or conferences. At the moment I have to open up a separate window/tab and enter the details of event I want to remember manually. Surely it would be easier if I could simply click the date, and have everything done for me so I’ve automatically got an entry in my Google Calendar. There may be a Greasmonkey script that could do that, but I’m not organised enough to set aside the time to look for it.

There are also the online task management solutions, like Remember The Milk but again, the time required to actually enter stuff on your lists is greater than the time you save by doing it. Again, I’m sure that if I took the time to learn how to use it properly I’d find it quite useful. I’d like to be able to do it without having to think about it too much though.

When it comes to notes, Google Notebook is quite good and integrates quite well with the other Google apps. It lets you make notes on pages that you come across and any other random notes. I have used it for making review notes, storing links to interesting sites for future use in blog posts, and jotting down random ideas. What I’d like to be able to do though is use Google Calendar as a filing system for those notes. Say I make a note on a certain day, I’d like if that note was automatically given an entry in Google Calendar (and optionally in Remember the Milk, but only if I choose to) on the date it was made. Another thing I’d like Google Notebook to do is use hotkeys, so that when I’m browsing and want to annotate a page I can just hit a hotkey and it’ll do the same as ‘note this’ in the context menu.

I’m the first one to admit that I’m quite lazy, at least when it comes to organizing myself. I’d basically like something to do it for me and not have to worry about setting it up and learning to use it, whatever it is. I aspire to the lazyness of the man who goes to thegym every day and works out for an hour because carrying around any extra weight it too much effort. Now I’m going to spend an hour or so clearing out my gmail inbox, sorting through my reader feeds and removing the ones I haven’t read in a while, and deleting drafts from my Wordpress dashboard (after backing up the best). I hope I don’t get distracted…

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