Keeping on top of things at work, and in my personal life, is a challenge. I’m neurodivergent, and struggle to form habits, even for things that others might find natural or easy. In this post, I share the framework that I use to stay organised, and offer some tips and tricks for getting things done.

Introduction #

As a kid, I coasted through a lot of my education. I had a natural curiosity and could get away doing what I wanted to, when I felt like it, and still get labeled “gifted” (which I think is pretty toxic for a bunch of reasons I won’t elaborate on in this post). When I reached A-Levels (late high school for US folks), I hit a brick wall. There was too much stuff to do, and some material was much harder than my “natural ability” could cope with. I didn’t have any tools for managing my workload, and really struggled for several years. At university, I was fortunate to get help from a “mental health mentor”, who helped introduce me to some tools and techniques for staying on top of things.

That was over a decade ago, and I’ve read plenty of books on “self-organisation” since. This post is to share what worked and what stuck for me, and hopefully to inspire you to experiment in your own life. Remember to be kind whilst you do! If you’re struggling, it’s probably because the defaults that work for other people, and society in general, don’t work for you.

As you find things that work, and practice them and build your own processes, it gets easier 🧡.

A high-level process #

There are, fundamentally, three things that I use to help myself get things done:

• My notes
• My calendar
• My task list

Notes are for my day-to-day thinking, the calendar is for things that involve other people (like meetings, or sharing something with my husband), and my task list helps remind me and prioritise what I’m going to work on. Calendars are probably familiar to many — my only advice for the calendar is, do not use it like a task list. Your calendar is for recurring meetings, birthdays, anniversaries, and blocking out time to help you focus. Because the use of calendars is widespread, I’ll focus this post on notes, and tasks.

Taking notes #

Writing notes helps me get thoughts out of my head, and forces me to articulate and organise what I’m thinking. My thoughts can feel like lightning bolts firing through connected topics, and quickly understanding connections between things is one of my strengths. But that means that writing things down is crucial, or they can get lost if my mind changes topic.

I use a reMarkable¹ tablet now, but in university I got through dozens of paper notebooks. I really like my digital notebook because I can move things around if thoughts end up written down in the wrong order (which is fairly regularly). It’s good to separate your work stuff from your personal stuff, so I use a separate (digital) notebook for work stuff, personal stuff, and larger projects.

Every day gets a new page, and I write the date at the top, which is a nice way to start my day. If I start doing something, it gets no indentation, and as I write thoughts down, they get indented each time as they get more specific or detailed. Moving stuff to the right visually makes it easy to see if you’re getting too far in to detail on something. If there’s suddenly loads of space on the left, what you thought was a sub-topic might actually deserve more attention and become a left-aligned “major topic”. My major topics usually start as questions, spawning more questions, and end with either an answer, or a task to think more about it another time.

At the end of the day, it’s good to go back through and review your notes. I use a ⭐️ on the left-hand side of my notes if I want to add a task for myself. Do not rely on your notes alone to remind you to do things. Reviewing my notes helps me learn things, and make sure no stars/tasks got lost along the way.

Using a task list #

I use Todoist² to manage my task list. I like it because it’s cross-platform, and has some natural language “scheduling” features that I’ll elaborate on shortly.

After starting my notebook page for the day, I’ll review my task list. It’s normal that I’ll end up with more tasks than one person could reasonably complete. Try not to get overwhelmed! Coping with a large task list is all about prioritisation ✨. I’ve developed a method I like to call the “four D”s:

• Do
• Delegate
• Defer
• Don’t

Do

Occasionally, a task is small enough that it’s better to get it done straight away. For example, this might be sending a message to someone to ask for their input, which you can review later. Or, it might be vital to complete quickly (like spotting a security-related problem at work) and therefore takes immediate priority over what you were doing.

If I do something straight away, I still like to write it down as a task, for the satisfaction of immediately marking it as done. If you notice that you’re doing many things straight away, you might be neglecting the other D’s.

Delegate

If you work in a team, and you’re increasing in seniority, it’s likely that there are countless things to do. The second thing to consider when you’re making a task is if someone else could/should do it. This could be an opportunity for someone else to learn, and if you have a habit of taking on all the “important” tasks, you might be accidentally starving the team of opportunities to grow.

The task might also not be important enough for you to tackle — at least not compared to your other tasks. In short, consider if this is a task for someone else, and can skip past your task list. I often make myself tasks to delegate something to someone else, so I can do a good handover.

Defer

If you decide that you’re the one who’s going to do the task, but you’re not going to do it right away (or in the short term, like today), then you can defer it.

I use Todoist’s scheduling feature to pick a date when the task should pop back up (usually using natural language — for example “Review X’s proposal in two days”). If, when the task comes back around, I still don’t think it takes priority, then I’ll defer it again.

Don’t

And finally, the art of simply not doing the thing. Folks who have had the pleasure of working any sort of team-based task list (like Jira) will know that task lists typically grow beyond your control. And tasks that you added a year ago probably don’t make sense any more because you either don’t understand the context any more, or the world has changed enough that the task doesn’t make sense.

If I’ve rescheduled a task beyond a couple of months, I’ll delete it. If it’s important enough, it will come back up. It’s funny how attached we can get to tasks if we write them down — deleting it can feel like giving up somehow. But I promise it’s OK, and you can even come to enjoy choosing to not doing things.

If you really want to keep something after this time, try approaching it differently — what you’re doing right now isn’t working. A helpful way of unsticking myself if a task keeps coming back up is to involve someone else — for example, if I’m writing a proposal, I’ll ask to talk it through with a colleague.

Conclusion #

I hope this post inspires you to think about your process for getting things done, and to make one if you don’t have one yet. There are numerous existing frameworks to learn from, some evangelical in their confidence about being “the one true way”, but everybody’s brains are different — it can take a few tries. It certainly did for me.

Try not to get discouraged if something doesn’t stick — give it a solid go, and try something else if it isn’t working. There will be something that works for you 🧡.