Easy to Search
You must be able to find anything you are looking for under 5 seconds.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a digital — organizing notes in Evernote — or physical system — organizing the movie collection. You must be able to find exactly what you are looking for fast.
In other words: the entire structure around your system must help you be more efficient
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Minimal Setup
You want to be able to set up your management system fast once and for all.
The only reason you are creating a system in the first place is to make your life simple, not more complicated. Don’t try to come up with the ‘perfect system’ that is at the same time super complicated to use and to set up.
Easy to Maintain
After setting up the system you will keep adding stuff to it — whether its clothes, notes or emails.
What this means is that you will be affecting the system by inputting more content into it. Having a system that it’s easy to maintain will ensure that it always stays organized.
Follow the rule of ‘two actions’: if it takes more than two actions to complete something, you are doing it wrong.
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Folders are not how the brain works. The brain works by thinking of something and finding it. You should be able to go to your documents folder and search for it immediately. The organization should not rely on folders but rather on the names of the actual document.
Here’s the question you want to ask yourself:
What is the major problem I am trying to solve?
Often we overlook the reason why we create a system: we just want to be organized for the sake of it.
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I cannot stress this enough: simpler is better!
Building a simpler system means that you will cover the three main rules to perfection. It will be easier to search, minimal setup will be necessary and will be quick to maintain.
Organization is normally confused with compartmentalizing information to the tiniest of detail.
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Start by thinking of what you can join by type and what big groups you need to create.
It would be weird to have different drawers for socks that have different colors. You would have one for black socks, another for blue socks and so on. This doesn’t happen: space is limited.
make it easy for other people to learn it.
To make life easier and start seeing progress fast — especially if you have thousands of items -, process them in batch. Follow 80/20 rule: focus the first 20% of your time into 80% of the items.
Focus on everything that you can process in bulk. You want to find things that you can either archive or delete altogether.
Get it done and unclutter your life.
After that, I had around 20% of my Pocket links left, at which point I started opening and reading it. I would then decide to do two actions only: archive with a tag or delete.
The ‘hack’ was to focus on the 80% of the task first. Do the same for your items.
Keeping Your System Organized
The main mistake after setting a new system is to forget how to use it going forward.
You make it more complex by adding layers, complicate search and don’t process incoming items.
Email to Inbox Zero
Ah, email, the corporate evil of the 21st century. I could only start with email in the examples.
I organized my inbox with only a handful of labels and I use multiple inboxes to view it in two columns. This turned my email into a GTD Gmail Inbox.
keep the organization simple: everything arrives in my inbox and gets sorted from there to either a notebook or trash. The inbox is my default notebook for screenshots as well
I have three different separate stacks: personal, projects and work. It’s pretty easy to understand what each one refers to, but I also try to keep the notebooks inside each stack to a minimal. This means using a broader category to aggregate different notes that are essentially the same type.
Tracking Expenses
A big one. You can do it using pen and paper, an online tool, looking at your bank statement or using a money management app.
Again, this doesn’t have to be more complicated than it needs.
I use a simple spreadsheet. I fill it every weekend with the following fields: how much, when, what, what type, perishable or not.
Remember the golden rules to build a great system:
Searchable: find anything in 5 seconds or less
Easy to set up: the simpler the system the easier it will be to set it up; aim for less than one hour
Easy to maintain: don’t add complexity as you go, instead try to remove layers
When setting your system for the first time you will need to process everything going backward. This means categorizing and filling all the items that will be in your system.
The easiest hack is to follow the 80/20 rule. Focus 20% of your efforts on 80% of the items so you clear the way to work on things that demand your attention. Those are the 20% of items which are the really important ones.
Start by processing larger items. Then batch the remaining ones by grouping them into related categories as you process them.