Getting Organised

I have been feeling really disorganised lately and getting more and more tired and frustrated. Some of the reason for this is the amount of time I have spent over at the Aussie Bloggers Forum. I´ve never really been much of a forum participator before but there´s a lot of interesting discussions going on over there and for a new blogger like me with a lot to learn, the information and advice from other forum members is invaluable. I´m not complaining about the forum at all - on the contrary! There´s just so much information to absorb that its getting addictive. The hours after 8pm are the only time we get uninterrupted peace and quiet, and Rocky´s been away for work the last few nights, so I’ve been staying up later and later. Not as much incentive to go to bed when there’s no-one there to warm the sheets up.

Plus I´ve now added so many great new blogs to Google Reader that it´s hard to keep up! I currently have 199 unread items - it´s a little out of hand.

So, I thought I´d better try and get myself organised and I am a sucker for a new gadget. You know, I could just write a to-do list on a piece of paper but that is so boring! I did a quick search today for online task management tools and came across Remember The Milk a website that lets you create all sorts of lists and keep track of them online. I love lists. You can integrate the lists with your blog, Gmail, iGoogle and Google Maps and if you need some prompting to make sure you get your tasks done, you can set it to “nag” you through email, SMS or instant messenger.

I´m not sure whether I will activate the nag feature. I don´t tend to find nagging a very good motivator and if anything it makes me less likely to complete the task (does this mean I am still a rebellious teenager??). I tried out Fly Lady the other week for a little while. I know a lot of people love this service and maybe I didn´t give it a good enough go, but, seriously, I was getting 15 emails a day which is just annoying! I get enough crap in my inbox everyday so adding to it like that turned me off almost immediately.

I like the fact that Remember the Milk is all online, and therefore accessible from any computer. In a few weeks we´ll be going home to Perth for a month and I´ll be hopping from computer to computer whenever I get the chance (trying to squeeze in a few blog posts hopefully) so I´ve been transferring as much as I can online, like my feeds to Google Reader. I always have a long list of the things I need to do and buy at home, for example getting my drivers licence renewed, stocking up on knickers at Target (it´ll be an exciting trip, I tell ya) and collecting paperwork from our storage shed. Hopefully I can get myself organised enough to put all my lists on Remember the Milk and then be able to access them anywhere.

*Sigh* Now I just to have find the time to write the lists. Its so much more fun reading blogs and chatting on forums…