Personal Organisation is Personal!

Personal Organisation is, well, personal. No one method suits everyone and it’s not just about your planning method, we live in an age where you have a choice of technology, ranging from good old paper to paper-like ultra thin tablet devices.

Some people just work with a ToDo list on a notepad, scribbling in the tasks of the day on the corner of their ‘page per day’ diaries and others like multi-level task lists and project managers on a PC, but whichever you choose, it is about what works for you.

There are however a significant number of people (as I have recently discovered) who, like me, suffer from a kind of ‘Organisational Nirvana Hunt’ bouncing from planner to planner, system to system. We sometimes end up in a state of ‘Paralysis by Analysis’, having organised ourselves to a standstill and finding ourselves staring at a plan that isn’t talking to us, we sit head in hands cradling a stress headache, unable to do anything.

Planner Tech – From Paper to Paper like.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a gadget addict. In the 1990’s I was nicknamed ‘Inspector Gadget’ by a colleague (after the cartoon character) because I never did anything the easy way when there was some sexy technology that could really screw things up and by the 00’s I was totally reliant on Microsoft Office and especially Onenote and Outlook.

There is nothing wrong with Outlook and the more recent integration of MS ToDo is great (although the integration is only really achieved if you access Outlook through a browser) but one thing I have always found that it lacked was a really easy to use GUI. It’s familiar, largely due to is global reach (unless you are using an Apple or Linux based product, your company probably has you using Outlook) but it somehow just doesn’t flow visually and I find that it does not help get your life in order!

Another thing that really appealed to the gadget addict in me was taking notes in Onenote on my company touchscreen laptop, oh yes, very high tech. The trouble is that I often found myself also using the laptop for Powerpoint presentations so taking notes at the same time is not possible. I have owned an Amstrad PDA600, assorted Psion devices, Palm Pilots and of course the ubiquitous iPhone, but if I am honest, whilst all of them (yes including the PDA600) were great in some way or other, for me, none of them took me to planning paradise.

On the paper side of things, I was a Filofaxer in the 80’s and in the early 1990’s was issued by my then employer, Telemecanique Ltd, with a very expensive Time Manager System from TMI International. Now, the Time Manager was a beast of an organiser, backed up with training workshops, manuals and lifestyle books and I was completely drawn into that world.

Time Manager was a good system but for a planning addict it was also an easy way to get trapped into over planning and I can clearly remember having a review with my then marketing manager because he was concerned that unusually for me, my productivity had dropped. Suspecting that he knew why, he took at look at the massively detailed plans in the Time Manager and realised that had literally planned myself to a stop.

Rocketbook – The cure for planning ‘brain fog’

And so it continued, me switching from one system to another looking for that perfect solution, especially making repeated efforts to make Outlook work for me, a situation that just kept stressing me out. Then, about a year or so ago, a colleague showed me a notepad that he had bought. It was from a company called Rocketbook, and this notepad was different for a couple of big reasons. Firstly it was reusable, you could write on it with a Pilot Frixion pen and then erase it with water and a cloth, but also it came with an app that made scanning your notes easy and automatically sent them to tools like Onedrive, Onenote, Google drive etc. so that you had the convenience of paper note taking but then had easy access to the notes within MS Office apps.

I was hooked, this was the best of both worlds and what’s more I found that I really liked the feel of writing on the pages of the Rocketbook, with the ink free flowing onto the pages. You have to give the ink longer to dry than on a traditional piece of paper but after a short while you stop smudging everything that you write!

So how did this help with my organisational problem? Once in the Rocketbook world you find yourself watching youtube tips and tricks videos as there are so many ways to adapt Rocketbooks and whilst doing this I can across the video below

The Rocketbook Panda Planner

Apart from the fact that the Rocketbook guys spacesuits always make me laugh, this video caught my attention as it was a planner based on Rocketbook tech, so I dug deeper. The Panda Planner is all about planning for what you want to get out of life rather than just ‘here are your tasks, do them’ and is set up so that you actually have a plan to achieve your goals. For me, having just taken early retirement and now working self employed as a copywriter, it is perfect. Since most days are my own, the Panda Planner stops one day from blending into another whilst letting your goals drift off into the distance.

What it isn’t is a planner like Time Manager. Yes you plan the steps you need to take to achieve what you want out of life, but it doesn’t have task sections, or multi layered task planning and that’s kind of the point of it. I won’t go into detail here as the video below gives a great introduction to the Rocketbook Panda Planner, so suffice to say that task management sits outside of the planner but you bring your projects and ToDo items into the Year, Month, Week and Day plans along with your goal actions.

In my case I still use Onenote to manage my copywriting projects and keep notes on progress. I also have Amazon Echoes around my home so my ToDo list is on the Alexa iPhone app and the task are added mostly verbally, but however you manage your tasks and projects, the Panda Planner brings them all together. Its pages are clearly laid out and being an physical document it sits in view all day, unlike Outlook, which even with a multiple monitor set up, inevitably gets hidden behind your other apps as you work.

The planner also gets you to spend time on reflection about the day ahead and the week just gone which I find helps me to really make sure that I am spending my time and energy wisely.

Cure yourself

In summary, if you are someone who really struggles with finding a planning system that helps you feel in control, and keep your mind clear and calm, then I can highly recommend the Rocketbook Panda planner.

Rocketbook – Smart Notebook – Reusable Notepads (getrocketbook.co.uk)

PS: By co-incidence I found this this blog entry that was posted by Rocketbook with ideas about managing your To Do lists, take a look: