Organized Konfusion

A couple months ago, Shane Mac (@shanemacsays) asked me to write a short chapter in an e-book he was writing. The concept of the book was “one thing we wish we would have known before we started our current career,” and it took all of two seconds before the answer came to me. Since I started working at VaynerMedia, there has been nothing more important than establishing and improving upon my organizational structure. I’ve gone through a good deal of trial and error to figure out the system I have now, and I’m constantly looking for ways to improve. I wanted to use this post to share how I keep everything straight every day, in the hopes that it gives someone an idea or inspires them to get their house in order.

Toodledo

This is my big gun. I started using Toodledo about a month ago and it’s blown me away with how useful its been. The basic functionality of Toodledo is creating tasks and checking them off when they’re completed. I prefer this style of organization because I flat-out enjoy checking things off, whether on paper or virtually. The advantage of Toodledo lies in all the ways you can customize your lists, from due dates to repeating tasks, and allows for a surprisingly sophisticated task management system.

Additionally, Toodledo has Firefox and Gmail plug-ins, allowing for even easier access to the service. Instead of going to the site to add a task, I can click on the green check mark next to the navigation bar. Without even going to the site, I can bring up the Toodledo side bar with a hot key and quickly see what tasks I need to be working on or to check off something I’ve completed. Toodledo makes it easy to access your lists, which is essential for getting me to use it. To give an example of how I use it, here’s a screen shot.

I browse through my folders every day to make sure that I’m on top of every initiative I’m responsible for, but throughout the day I sort by due date more often so I can get what needs to be done, done.

Email

Email is my second wave of organization. For anything important that needs to be completed by a certain date, I use Toodledo, but in order to keep tabs on open conversations and make sure I don’t forget about something, I use a Gmail labeling system.

This system has two tiers, the first being “high”, “mid”, and “low” labels that segregate the emails by urgency. I make sure I always know exactly what is in “high” and the second I can act on something, I do so. I check “mid” throughout the day to complete anything I can move on there, and I leave “low” for whenever I have free time. I also use three different color stars to determine whether I need to respond, whether I’m waiting for a response but should follow up if I don’t get one soon, or if I should just wait for a response.

Google Calendar

Google calendar is my final, and least important, organizational tool. While I could probably replicate a lot of Google Calendar’s functionality with Toodledo and consolidate what I need to look at, I like the ability to visualize my schedule and compare it to that of my co-workers. I don’t do anything special with Google calendar so I’ll toss in this little tip which AJ showed me a couple weeks ago. When adding an event on the calendar, instead of letting it default to one hour and going in to change the length of the event, if you include the length in the name of the activity the event will adjust automatically. For example, “Write blog post for ten mins” makes a ten minute event.

In the end, a good organization structure can only limit mistakes, it can’t prevent them. Despite the fact that I’m way more confident in my ability to stay on top of what I need to get done now, I still make mistakes and let things slip by me. Controlling the human element and giving the system all the information it needs to assist you is the true key to becoming more efficient. A good system, however, will give you a major head-start.