My Workflow Sucks
If you know me, you know that I am a somewhat chaotic person (I can hear all of my former lieutenants laughing as we speak). Back in the day before I’d tried to gadget=ify (I know that’s not a word but work with me here) I used to carry around a notebook and write everything down. But what I discovered is that I no longer check my notebook any more because I’m expecting things to be on my calendar.
Understanding that there is a ton of information that cross my fingertips every day, I’ve tried to come up with systems that enable me to keep track of things. My new S3 is an officer after my own heart because he puts EVERYTHING on the Outlook calendar. Not only that but he copies and pasts in the information from the order into the Outlook event so there is no hunting for the information when it’s due.
Which is awesome. For work.
My home life – you know the one where I pretend to be a fully functioning writer/adult/parent/wife is not quite the same. I tried to do lists. They don’t work because they require that I go into an app to see what I’m supposed to do. I’ve tried my iphone’s reminders. I don’t like it because I have to add my grocery story to my contacts which are already screwed up enough in order for the app to remind me to pick up eggs.
I settled on leaving emails unread when they still require action. Which was sort of working until yesterday when chaos struck. Exhibit A: my blog tour.
What I’d been doing is once I scheduled a stop, I would leave the email unread until I a, added it to my calendar, b, added it to the tour page on my blog and c, completed the post for said tour. When adding it to my calendar, I titled the event Blogging at XX location, regardless of whether it was a guest post, an interview or something in between. Which then created the problem of me not remembering what I’d scheduled.
Except that yesterday I realized that I not only hadn’t done all the posts like I thought I had, I’d also failed to keep track of all the places I was stopping. Which then saw me emailing everyone who I thought I’d coordinated with and asking if I’d sent in what I owed them. Thankfully, I didn’t miss any dates but I still felt terrible because I’d scheduled this stuff – some of these events months ago – and now I couldn’t remember and thus had to bother people who were being incredibly supportive.
Which brought me back to full circle to literally sitting down and writing down every stop on the blog tour I’d coordinated for and checking my blog tour folder on my computer to see if I had a post named after the blog and if I did, checking it off and if I didn’t firing off an email to check in.
Crude. Primitive. 1995 ish even. But today, I feel like I’ve gotten a better handle on my organization problem. At least for now, until it spirals out of control again.
So what I need is an email app that will let me add an email as an event to a calendar, add more specific notes to the calendar event, and trigger a to do note somewhere that I don’t forget it.
How’s that for crisis management. And they let me lead soldiers. Pitiful, isn’t it.
So bloggers, help me out. How do you keep track of everything: guest posts, review requests, giveaways? What works for you? Cause if I don’t manage the chaos somehow, I’m going to lose my mind!
