So the New year is quickly approaching and I have the week off from work. In light of this, I've been trying to get myself organized. I have never in my life been very organized, and though I never felt it was particularly debilitating to my ability to do things I find I have too many things to keep track of at once without some way to remind me. I'm hoping that adding a degree of structure to how I do things might enable me to plan more efficiently and focus better. So without further ado the organizational tactics I am hoping to hold to in the coming year:

• Email: I have cleared out my email list. I have never really made an effort to keep my unread email count down and I was up to about 2500+ unread emails. However, by not controlling my email at all I've had no incentive to remove unecessary email sources. I imagine I could reclaim some time in my day from identifying my largest sources of unecessary email and removing them from my email stream. I've also been rather poor in the past at responding to email that takes any degree of thought to respond to. However, since I've archived all of my previous email the only email I will have in my Inbox is email that has not yet been dealt with. By keeping to this Done/Not Done dichotomy, whenever I check my email client I will have a much clearer picture of things I still need to deal with.
• Calender: I mostly keep track of things I plan on doing in my head. This works well for things I am consistently thinking about, or fairly short range plans, but I've sometimes been reliant upon things like facebook events for reminding me of social engagements etc. I'm resolving now to keep track of events myself via Google Calender so that all of my plans are explicit. If all of my plans are laid out in one calender system I can do a quick look at the beginning of the week etc. for a reminder of upcoming events. Every day, I get an email reminding me of any events I have coming up for the day as a last minute reminder. As an added bonus, if this is kept to people who want to work around guest's schedules can check independently if I'm free for an appointment etc. at any given time.
• Media: I'm normally pretty good at this, but just a reminder to myself to centralize my media on one machine. It makes it easy to find, and I will never forget my media if I plan on travelling and wish to bring along something in particular.
• Documents: I don't keep a great deal of paper documentation of things these days. Most of my bills etc. are digital these days for convenience. I plan on doing my taxes this year however, and so I will need to actually keep tax related documents in a reasonable state of order. I've got a file folder case that can keep track of these, so all it will take is enough willpower to file whenever I receive paper documents.
• Finances: I've started tracking what happens with my money now with Mint.com. It isn't always perfect at categorizing my transactions so I need to do some degree of manual curation of my transactions but it saves on the bulk of my bookkeeping as to where my cashflow is going. For the time being I've been focusing on descriptive budgeting, looking at my current consumptions patterns and setting my budgets to be in line with how my spending currently is. Once I feel confident in those budgets holding I can focus on modifying those to be more prescriptive, where I modify my behaviours to limit my larger line items. I'm aiming to bring my finances to a healthy cushion level before I go back to schooling so this is an area where optimizing seems like a great idea.

This feels like a large list of areas to focus on greater organization, but it mosly hinges on subtle changes to my habits. One of my biggest weaknesses has always been organization and time management, and the New year is a nice chance to break with old habits and create some new. Even if not all of these stick, if a majority do I will be well on the way to improving one of my greatest weaknesses, which is never anything to scoff at.

Anyone else taking a chance to use the new year for finally shaping up their organization? For those that are, feel free to share tips/ideas for areas to improve on.

I haven't written anything publicly in a while. I can't really make any excuses for myself beyond the fact that whenever I have anything interesting to talk about I have multiple avenues of discourse to pursue it in, and they tend to be a great deal more active than a blog where I never put anything. So almost anything interesting I want to talk about is discussed on Google+ or Facebook with my more tech inclined friends, or discussed with them in person.

This is a fine approach most of the time. You'll never find my disparaging social interaction via social networks or in person, especially the latter. I am very sociable and I tend to use social networks far too often for my own good, and they're highly interactive formats to discuss in. They're ideal for a quick discussion. That tends to be the kind of discussion I'm looking for, since I tend to be reasonably busy and mostly talk discuss things in my spare time in a shallow way. It's a good way to pass time.

So why am I resurrecting writing about stuff in greater depth and posting it here instead of just linking interesting articles on G+, facebook, etc? I've realised it's been a while since I had to think very hard about what I'm talking about, mostly. When you need to talk about something in a post, it requires you to think about what you're saying to create clarity in your message. In my professional life the most demanding writing I tend to do is small email discussions and justifying myself via comment during code reviews, so I don't want my writing skills to diminish. By forcing myself to write more often I can ensure that my ability to break down a topic and clearly represent my position or opinion.

If I rarely need to do this exercise in either my professional or personal life, one might wonder why I bother caring about whether or not I retain this. I could argue that the ability is essential to being a well rounded human or some other inspired reasoning, but honestly I just enjoy the idea of self improvement. Improving my writing is an easy way to hone a skill that's useful and applicable in most walks of life, and tends to be sometimes poor in my particular industry. All in all, it can't hurt.