From Chaos to Clarity: Approaches to Organizing your Digital Life
Something that people in the tech industry tend to struggle with early in their careers is self-organization. Figuring out what the best process is for you and the best way to organize your digital life can be an essential skill to develop early and iterate on throughout your career.
Meanwhile, in our personal lives, the allure of social media platforms such as Reddit, TikTok, or Instagram can prove to be a constant temptation that disrupts our concentration and reduces productivity. Consequently, it becomes crucial to develop a reliable system of self-organization to effectively navigate the digital realm. Our everyday devices and systems, which we heavily depend on, have the potential to transform into sources of distraction, hampering our ability to stay focused and work with optimal efficiency.
Developing strategies around keeping yourself focused is good for you both personally and professionally. In this article, I’m going to go over a couple of ways of working on this by utilizing Notion, a user-friendly and highly customizable productivity, and note-taking web application. Here are some approaches to doing so that might be helpful for you:
The PARA Method
PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive and was developed as a “second brain” by Tiago Forte (https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/). Forte argues that we are taught throughout school to organize things into overarching classifications and due to this we tend to carry forward this process that results in scattering many ongoing projects into classifications that make it harder to track everything that we have going on. In PARA, you coordinate your life via 4 organizational folders:
Projects
Short-term, specific things you want to work on. For example, saving for a new computer, putting up a pet tower, or writing a proposal for work.
Areas
Long-term goals that require ongoing attention. For example, finishing your degree, learning a new language, or learning to draw
Resources
Materials that you are excited to learn more about. For example podcasts about a topic you’re interested in, links to online learning courses, or images you want to sketch.
Archive
Completed projects, areas that are no longer active/relevant, or resources that you’re no longer interested in.
As you work you keep track of ongoing work so that you can be up to date with completing and archiving items. This gives a sense of accomplishment and allows you to easily track the status of things in your life. This will appeal especially to engineers who have short-term tickets (projects) to work on, growth plans (areas) to keep track of, and blogs/tutorials/podcasts (resources) to review.
Maintaining your digital life in this fashion is a useful and powerful tool for improving your self-organization. To set this up you really just need two databases (one covering Projects, Areas, and Archive and one for the Resources) and a couple of different views over them. However, if you don’t want to spend a bunch of time putting that together, I’m selling a PARA Method Template on Gumroad for $0.99.
CRISP System
I’m using the acronym Continuously Ranking and Incorporating Subsequent Priorities — CRISP — here mostly because I needed a snappy name for what is essentially a running task list. What I’ve found as I’ve advanced in my career is that life and work can sometimes mean lots and lots of high-priority items that you can’t let slip.
When you run into this sort of situation a heavy organizational process may be more of a burden than a help. Enter the CRISP System — a task list automation in Notion built flexibly for managing priorities:
An ideal implementation features a database template that automatically generates a new entry every morning at 9am, stamping the current date and syncing your living task list across all generated documents. As you complete tasks you move them from your living task list to a completed section in the current day’s document and check them off. If you just want to plan to get a number of tasks done you can move them over and wait until they are done to check them off. I’ll often use Notion date stamping in my sync blocks to make sure that future items get done on the target date.
To put it together you just need a database, a recurring default template, and the sync block, but if you want to save yourself 20 minutes and get started quickly I’m selling the CRISP System Template for only $0.99 on Gumroad.
INKPAD Process
OK maybe we’ve gone off the rails with the acronyms here — but sometimes the oldest solution is the best one. Maybe using digital options for everything is part of the problem. You can always use the INKPAD Process — Intuitive Notebook Keeping for Producing Actionable Data. It’s just a pad of paper on your desk and a pen, write things down and cross them off. If you think you can suffer with a task list that can’t be dragged or dropped anywhere, and is permanent, when your notebook is full you can just toss it! Or save it and marvel at your thousands of tasks stretching back into your past.
Personally, I like to be able to search my history!
Hopefully one of these 3 options works for you or at the very least inspires you to discover the best way to organize your digital life. I find that having a consistently applied process (I mix and match PARA and CRISP) is really useful for me and it’s something I see others struggle with.
If you have any suggestions for alternative processes or would like to request a different template you can leave a comment on this post!
