From Digital PDAs to Pocket Notes - Rebellion Against the Organised

In the Beginning, there was the Organised

Being an Organised Person, even an Organised Mother, and Scrapper, is a big thing nowadays. So big, that there are entire lifestyle enhancements, gurus and things to buy to help out styled around the need. Anything like that brings out the chaotic rebel in me, but I do try.  (Graphic from Organised Mum.co.uk)

And so it Began with the Electronic 

There are many people who live by their PDAs. I used to own a PocketPC, and loved it, but eventually found that I was using it for digital stash collecting - long before I became as much a junkie in stash collecting in the scrapbooking side of things - rather than using it for what I was meant to be doing. Instead of organising my life, I located and uploaded the kewlest little applications - anything from a world map, a PocketPC version of the London tubes map (even though I lived in New Zealand!) to some great java-based games. Which I was rubbish at.

When I upgraded to a newer version of the application software, and found my whole pocket toy ground to a halt, I simply didn’t pursue it anyway. Besides, they are incredibly expensive over here in the UK. This year I went looking for a mobile phone, with the initial thoughts being to get myself a Smart Phone with all the latest PocketPC abilities. I ended up with a bog standard fliptop - one of the most popular because of it’s own attributes. When I considered the size of my purse, the fact that I was already carrying around a little address book (as a backup created in case my old Pocket PC died of course!) and an IPOD in the same bag - room for the mobile, wallet and odd female bits and pieces was at a premium. Exit any notions for expensive organiser. I just needed to phone home.

Day Planner Believer

After my PocketPC “phase” I moved then into the latest greatest Franklin Covey dayplanners - sized to impress on my desk. Years beforehand, an old employer had sent all their staff on a FC time management class, where we were all given a Dayplanner to use and abuse. I knew what I was up against then. Like many, I started off with the great New Year Intentions bug. By February, less appointments and reminders sat there on my planner pages than existed in real life. And I began to wonder if there might not be a smaller way to carry all my life around in my handbag. With the movement and onslaught of the Filofax, I’ve actually tried those out in a couple of sizes too. I resorted to cheap and tiny little organisers - you could then get all sorts of them, even for five year olds - and a separate address book. The important address area in tiny organisers was virtually unusable - the address fields were so small that you couldn’t write the full address in. And unless I found the same planner the next year, the addresses in one year’s planner were inevitably non-transferable to the next. That’ll teach me not to buy cheapo planners from the £2 store, then.

Planner to Scrapbooker, the Combination - Make Your Own with Sarabinders

In scrapbooking, over the past few years, there have been many trends of “alt”-ing up normal dayplanners. Challenges to pretty up dayplanner pages have peppered many a scrapbooking community. The next lot must be due around November this year, in preparation for 2007. In fact, Simple Scrapbooks noticed this and brought out a Scrappers-Orientated dayplanner type book. Autumn Leaves came through with it’s lovely Desktop CD-Case like yearly calendars also. And Memory Makers brought out it’s own planner in 2006.  Altering up or decorating your own planner for the year kind of makes good sense - at least after spending so much time and effort on the thing, it would be only disappointing yourself if you didn’t use it past February - right?  I thought so too. That’s why I bought into the whole trend that is Sarabinders. Hot off the Press saw this one a long way off, and created this whole system of planner stuff for the scrapbooker to “alt” up. I even bought the little 5x7 inch sized ringed binder and many of the insert products - which look incredibly similar to those you would find from Franklyn Covey or others.

Modern E-Planning Tools

Since forays into the physical, online calendars and organisers have become incredibly prevalent. Free online calendars (google calendar, yahoo calendar, planzo, and the rest…), to-do lists, project organisers, databases, blogging devices, reminder services (like freminder.com), the works. If you look around, you will find many useful applications online and downloadable to organise your life together. I have tried probably 1/4 of them. Some I’ve bought, and use to this day - occasionally. Some litter my hard-drive after expiring from their free trial, and I really must tidy up. At work, I’m all electronic. You kind of have to be - everyone else uses your Outlook like it’s going out of business. Telling them to book your time and write you a note through a desk-top dayplanner might not be the rght career choice as the time to rebel against the boss.

If you do like online type organisers, then you will probably like some of the following - Backpackit (the starter edition is free, and you can use it to organise lists and prompts online - get reminders to your email too), or Basecamp or Tada Lists from 37 Signals  or more lists from 43Things,

And for help at your PC - I love Evernote. It’s free, and with the Webclipper Extension, you can take a swipe of any text or a whole webpage you may find into it; and catergorise and search by anything you want.  You can also download additional templates for it, including to do lists, numbered lists, and milage and meeting agenda lists. Try some from GTD Wannabe. But obviously, there are many other stickynote applications out there also.

There are other organiser type database applications out there. An award winner, and one I also use to hold passwords and all sorts is Treepad. The Lite Version is available free, and you can download all sorts of organiser type templates to use within the databases. Hold everything like journal notes, to graphics, articles and passwords. 

And we mustn’t forget organising (and finding them again!) all those scrapbooking website links we’re all fond of collecting. There are enough free bookmark managers online to satisfy any dire link-lurker. Most come with little browser add-ons to allow you to click on a bookmark button as you come across the website, and post it to your online database. This way, you have backup to your browser bookmarks, and access online to your links from anywhere on the World Wide Web. Do a search for Top Online Bookmark (or Favourites) Organisers and you’ll find hundreds. After trialing around twenty myself, I settled on what I would suggest is the best ever - that of Linkagogo. It allows folders and categorisation, and publication to live sites, with keywords, descriptions, and ease of picking up all URLs from a page. Others may be prettier, but Linkagogo is the best. You will see me personally moving over all my many scrapbooking links to this online organiser as I’ve previously suffered from losing a few here. Linkagogo also has a checking facility to confirm live and dead links, and provides regular bookmark backup files to you weekly. Import and export in many formats also.

An Organised Life via Fly

In the local stationery shops and bookshops today, I notice that the 2007 calendars and organisers are already out.  However, I was again considering what was available both on and offline for the coming year - whilst trying to avoid going down the whole Flylady route. I’m not a flylady type of lady (nothing against those who are) - but do like the concept of reminding myself to get organised - within reason. Flylady scares me - it’s not only about organising things like household bills and things (not a problem in this household) but in cleaning. Shiver. Flylady wants me to clean. If I took the actual flies out of this house, what would my little kittie have to chase around? But I’m painting a picture a little bleaker than what it really is. I’m not after life-organisation, just something to store the important bits in. Besides, if you look deep enough past the actual flybaby water bottles featured on the Flylady site, you do find the SHEshop (SHE stands for Sidetracked Home Executives- which kind of discounts this current fultime worker, but I get the drift…) and a - Bound to Be Organised Day Planner. I guess Flylady is to SAHMs what Franklyn Covey may be credited towards time management at the office. Franklyn doesn’t do fairy wings, though.

Fly = Planner, Too. Digitalise and Customise ‘Em!

With Dianne Rigdon’s digital dayplanner templates (available through Scrapartist), there now appears a new refreshing of the trend to printout dayplanner templates, especially in the digital world. In the Horizon Planner Templates, Dianne has created a normal set (often found in your bookstore and day planner store), one for scrapbookers, and one for digital scrapbookers. The only difference is that these can be decorated with digital elements and papers before printing out to put into your actual planners (A5 size). Custom templates are a great idea, especially new to the digital world, but not a new idea out there already online…

Organised Scrapbooks - but Add Templates With That

Organized Scrapbooks is a website which was built on the organising trend prevalent in women scrapbookers. It’s been around for quite some time, and  has some nice planner templates available also. These are for inventorising things like Diecuts and Quotes. Sister Sites, Organized Home, and Organized Christmas, hold additional planner templates (just as well, there’s only 98 days to Christmas). Check out the full scope of templates and a household notebook at Organized Home. Oh, and theres a SewOrganized site too.

D*I*Y Planner - Add Templates for Everything Else, oh - AND Scrapping

D*I*Y Planner is a website with a large following, and is now up to Version 3 of it’s templated downloadable planning system. There are so many templates, forms and graphic downloads to put into your day planners here, that there is a community to help out. I see DIY Planner as a pushback against the expense of some of the dayplanner systems available out there, like Filofax. At DIY Planner, provided you have a printer available to arrange and printout the templates, you can create a planner relatively for free. You can setup a classic (5.5 x 8 inch or the A5 size here). By the Way, DIY has a scrapbooking section, full of articles and ideas for those of us who are planner challenged thanks to the excuse of being “creative”.

Rebel Against the Planner - the Hipster PDA (Can You Scrap It?)

But from D*I*Y Planner we also find movement into an even more anti-movement against the cost of all these planning systems (especially the PDAs). Here we start reading about the Hipster PDA.  What’s a Hipster PDA? It’s planner templates printed onto a set of index cards (or you can have simple blank index cards for notes etc). Hipster PDAs are proverbially accompanied by a binder clip to hold it together, and a pen. DIY Planner has approximately 100 of these templates available sized to print on index cards, from life management, calendars, storyboards, project planning to mindmaps. Grown from the David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) concepts (similar in some principles to that of Flylady), the Hipster PDA is the antithesis towards those expensive PocketPCs I used in another lifetime. The whole Hipster PDA thing started off by Merlin Mann on his 43 Folders website. Hipster PDAs have apparently been taken up a lot by the IT community (being one of them, I think it’s fair enough to suggest that we always are on the lookout for a way to keep that nerdy pen-toting look about us - it took a lot to get that subculture going). There are various versions - can you see the scrapbooking implications in this one - assembling you Hipster is up to you. Whether a binder clip, rubber bands, or notebook cover version, or simply a round keyring clip. These appear no different in scrapbooking opportunities than any of the mini albums we’re all making.

Rebel Even More with the PocketMod

 And now we find the biggest (or smallest) rebellion on earth - a free planner, creatable online, which can be folded up from a normal 8.5 x 11 inch printer page, and fits in your wallet. The PocketMod has a selection of day, month, year planners, lined papers, lists, shopping lists, and grids to use on your customisable planner. Decorate the front cover if you really want to scrap it.

Back to Scrapbooking and Organisation

So, I’ve got a planner of some type - probably decorated up a little aka scrapping style. That will get my life organised (for the smallest amount possible, that is). But Scrapbooking and Organisation is a far larger topic than this blog can deal with.  Many scrappers move in (and often out, when contemplating the sheer size of the exercise) to the separate art of inventorising their crafting life - from magazines they subscribe to, ideas they want to keep, inventories of scissors, stickers, papers, diecuts, other stash. Layout ideas, website URLs, swaps and dates. Organized Scrapbooks, and D*I*Y Planner (see links above, and below - so to speak) both provide free template downloads for these types of inventories. I admire anyone who managed to categorise and inventorise in this way, I really do. I stopped after I realised I had a good 100 rubber stamps, not counting the alphas. Primedia and Memory Makers both have brought out copious Scrapbooking Organisation idea books also - solely, it seems, to make me slather over the amount of shelving options available to U.S. Residents. But with a little Ikea-make do attitude, I too, am reasonably organised on the physical front. Scrapjazz has now brought out an Ebook on the subject - The Scrapjazz Guide to Organizing Your Scrap Space.

It’s a Goal, a Happy Scrapper Goal

Digital stash is another matter. And not one to go into here.  But it’s nice that Dianne Rigdon has a Digital Template pack out, mind you, concentrating on those specific themes (see links below). So back we go to organising a paper-based scrapper’s stuff. Via Simplify 101 com (a website with similar concepts to those found in GTD and Flylady ie declutter, and bind up those organised entries) we have The Happy Scrapper. Written by Aby Garvey, who has taken classes at Big Picture Scrapbooking, this purchasable PDF e-book comes with questionnaires, worksheets and scoring systems to focus on what your real scrapbooking goals may be. It also comes with the Central Binding Ideals similar to those found at Simplify 101. The Scrap Central Binding system helps organise scrapping ideas (and purge others).

Back to Binders at Scraps Organised Ahoy!

Organised Binder systems for scrapping aren’t again any new idea. Here’s an article at Families.com, suggesting the same concept by  Nicole Humphey. But perhaps one of the longest outstanding systems of planner templates for scrapbooking inventories sits with Scraps Ahoy. The Scrapmaster Organization Tool is a series of templates for anything from embroidery floss to magazine and journal ideas.

Database It - Back to the E-Side

Moving back to the E Side (Electronic Side), I start to think about the many database systems starting to come out here, some trying for the crafting market (oh, how they don’t know the quantities involved…) But if you are really going to inventorise everything (and there are digital scrapbooking photo organisers which do this too), then a database application of some sort is a worthwhile looksee - if only to work out that it’s a big job either way you do it.

There’s a few for scrapbookers. Take a look at Organized Expressions for Scrapbooking, a purchasable database system of software which can hold inventories, track swap information, and provides a personal diary / journal for your scrapbooking projects. This is made by the same makers who have a sewing and other craft applications. The front page looks a little, well, cartoony, but the features seem alright (spoken like somebody who hasn’t afforded to try it because she’s digital, and tackling that all now), and it’s been written up at HGTV.com.

CraftMemo is a new one, not only a project and inventory record system - but once signed up it’s online for you. You can also import in screenshots of your stash, and hook into financial software (frightening thought, that).  

Craft Software for the Business User is available - expensive, but does invoicing etc.  In a similar vein is the Craft Manager.

 And So The End Came

Where did this all get me, then? Aside from some interesting browsing around, and reading, I think a combination approach in rebelling against too stringent a declutter (clutter begats creativity and all that…) means I quite like the look of using my dust-gathering Sarabinder collection, combined with some downloaded templates from D*I*Y Planner, and prettying up some others. I like the PocketMod concept for simply adding dates so I remember (it’s not that often I have a dental appointment, afterall) and I like the index concept and templates from the Hipster (plus I’m a tech geek anyway). And the scrapbooking organisation can go to the dogs - I’m too busy trying to get my External Hard-Drive(s) in order. I use quite a few electronic helpers also. So my planning days are before me, and I hope that some of these have piqued your own organised mind also.

Reference Links.

• Franklin Covey - dayplanners and time management systems. It’s about goal setting too. Lots of articles onsite.
  
• Filofax - the dayplanner of choice for many
  
• Sarabinders - Hot off the Press does scrapable planners.
  
• Flylady - join in and become a flybaby, and buzz around organising your domestic life. Works for many.
• Backpackit from 37 Signals - Organise to-do lists, notes, calendars and prompts online.
• Basecamp from 37 Signals. There is a free version where you can organise and colloborate over one project online.Create team tasks, store research material, set reminders, a Campfire (chat system), and Writeboard group system available. Great if you are organising a group newsletter or similar.
  
• Tada List from 37 Signals - if all you want is an online To Do List where you can share your lists, tag them, and check them off, then try this one out.
  
• 43 Things - is another list sharing online group thing. Share your lists (or keep them private) for your whole life plans.
  
• Evernote - free notetaking software. Take a full copy of any webpage, and categorise all notes into dates, categories, keywords etc. Templates available at GTD Wannabe
• Treepad is a great database system for holding notes, in a tree structure. Free on the lite version. Can also publish to the web, or as an ebook.
• Linkagogo for Online Bookmarks Organisation - or try the many hundreds of others.
  
• Dianne Rigdon’s Horizon Series of Dayplanner Templates - Digitally-Customisable and Printable. Normal templates for days, months, to dos, plus Scrapbooking and Digital Templates - for instance, a page to keep your Creative Team Committments.
  
• Organized Scrapbooks with scrapbooking inventory planner templates, and articles on scrapbook organisation. Organized Home with household notebook and templates. Organized Christmas with christmas organisers.
  
• D*I*Y Planner - printable templates for dayplanners. Many templates, forms and grahic printables free on this site.
• D*I*Y Planner’s Hipster PDA templates - planner templates to print onto index cards (lots of ‘em).
  
• Hipster PDA at 43 Folders. 43 Folders wiki on Hipster PDA. More templates created for the Hipster. John Norris has some more templates on his blog also.
  
• 43 Folders on GTD (Getting Things Done)
  
• PocketMod - free printable A4 sized organiser to fold up and keep in your pocket
• The Scrapjazz Guide to Organizing Your Scrap Space - an ebook available on storage organisation.
  
• Simplify 101 - find more space in your home, time in your daily life etc. From Simplify (similar principles to those of Flylady and GTD - declutter, organise via binders etc) we can find the Happy Scrapper system - a system of worksheets and templates to organise your scrapping life (goals)
  
• The Scrapmaster Organization Tool - binder templates for scrapbook stash inventories and ideas, at Scraps Ahoy
• Organized Expressions for Scrapbooking - software application to inventorise and diarise your scrapbooking stash and projects.
  
• Craftmemo - online and free database and organiser for stash and projects.
  
• Craft Software - expensive version for the professional. Inventories, invoicing etc. Or try Craft Manager.
  

Update on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 06:58PM by Michelle@Scrapability

1. I see that 43F is linking to me - something about the fact that my stories are funny. Ummm…..I guess that is a compliment.

2. New link - this woman won an aware on organisation. Online Organizing has forums, a monthly newsletter - this months one deals with organising photos and memorobilia; runs workshops, has a tip of the day, and articles. Oh, and there is a section to help you choose your organiser.