Tidy up your life: organisation tips for your work and beyond from a UX Researcher

It was recently time for our end of year FanDuel UX & Design team awards ceremony. This year, I was surprised to discover I’d won ‘Most organised team member’. I’ve always considered myself to be a really disorganised person. It was only when I was chatting to my colleague Corinna Bruce afterwards, that I realised that being disorganised and the constant act of trying to remedy it has actually made me some kind of organisation expert (please don’t expect any Marie Kondo magic from me).

So, I’m going to share some organisation tips that will hopefully help you feel less stressed and get on top of your work and life admin.

Keep it together

Are you the kind of person who has an endless supply of notebooks that are either blank because they’re too pretty to use, or that have been abandoned half of the way through?

Do you have an array of post-its stuck to your monitor that are curling at the edges, having been there for so long?

Do you have an Evernote, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, OneNote, Trello, ToDoIst, plus random files dotted around your desktop, all with things you need to remember to do?

I’ve been all of these people!

My first tip is to bring everything into one place. Use one app for all of your reminders or tasks — preferably one that syncs with all of your devices. If you prefer to work on paper, keep all your post-its, scraps of paper inside the same notebook. Try to categorise the notebook as best as you can — in the past I’ve used dividers or sticky page tabs for this.

I like to keep my work admin in the same place as my life admin because it gives me visibility over everything I need to do. However, I know that some people like to switch off and keep their work separate so they’re not tempted to start thinking about or doing work in their free time. I have used different tools to track my work tasks and my life tasks and it caused a lot of friction, and I’d blame myself for being disorganised. To keep life and work separate but still stay organised, it might help to use the same tool with different logins, or split your notebook in half: one half for work, the other for personal stuff.

Checklists

Checklists are my best friend. I first started to use them in my graduate role, where my colleague told me about this book. I’ve not read all of it yet but the principles of it really stuck with me. The book explains that even the most experienced surgeons use checklists to avoid missing a crucial step — one that can result in death. My job as a UX Researcher isn’t as hazardous as that thankfully, but I also use a checklist to set up, execute, and share my research sessions. This (pictured below) took me about five minutes to set up, and it has saved me countless hours of stress and last-minute panic. I print it out before every round of research I do, fold it up and keep it with my test script/topic map.

To-do lists

Everyone knows what a to-do list is. In theory, they sound great, but in reality, they don’t always work. If your to-do list isn’t accessible to you at a particular time, you might end up writing it in your notes or your phone or scribbling it down somewhere, or worse, trying to commit it to memory. Then, it gets buried and you forget and somebody asks if you’ve done it and you curse yourself internally.

I use my to-do list for everything now. I have a tonne of ideas throughout the day and a terrible memory, so I try to commit everything to paper/pixels.

Initially, my to-do list started as a simple list pad, which I really liked because it was small and portable. However, it meant I had to remember to actually bring the list with me, which didn’t always happen.

So I switched over to the Apple Reminders app. I had tried to use it before, but had fallen away from it many times. However, the benefit of the Reminders app is that I can access the same list from my phone, my laptop and my work computer..

I used to have loads of different lists within the app, but I’ve actually switched to having just 3: Reminders (I usually keep this for shopping lists); Work to-dos, and; General to-dos (life admin tasks, like remembering to make a doctor’s appointment).

I realised the issue I had using the Reminders app previously was that I found it overwhelming to see a long list of things I had to do, and struggled to prioritise which one to do first. I also have trouble reading off screens, so all the words just sort of blended into this big stressful mess.

My new setup works differently. I break down my to-dos inside of the Reminders app, adding a divider for each day of the week. Then, I schedule each task for when I want it to be finished by. If I don’t finish it by then, no worries. I can just extend the due time, or push it to tomorrow.

When I start my day, I go straight to the ‘Scheduled’ view on Reminders. This gives me a prioritised list. When I add tasks to my to-do list, I always move them to be under a specific day, but I usually won’t actually set the due date and time until the evening before, so that the scheduled view stays fairly clean and not overwhelming. I’ve found that adding emojis to my tasks helps me process the information better — in the same way that using icons can help users to recognise functions.

I also have a category divider for ‘Later / Repeat’. This is for tasks that I want to remember but aren’t imminent, as well as tasks that repeat each day/week. To keep all my reminders in one place, I add repeating tasks such as checking my starred Slack messages once a week and move those into my to-do list.

Emails

Again, this isn’t groundbreaking information, but you’d be surprised by how effective this strategy actually is. Organising your inbox — I’ve never done it! But at the end of last year, I got a notification to tell me my Outlook was almost out of storage, so I had to deep dive into almost 2 years of emails to decide which ones were important, and which ones I could safely delete. There was always this fear in the back of my mind about deleting emails (‘I might need it later’).

However, I now treat my inbox as my email to-do list. As soon as I read an email I either put it in a folder, delete it, or leave it in my inbox if I need to do something from it. Putting emails into folders means that if I really think I need to keep those Medium articles, the next time Outlook tells me it’s at breaking point and I need to delete some stuff, I can go ahead and delete that folder of articles rather than trawling through a long disorganised list and accidentally deleting something important. It’s also much easier to find something in a list of 40 things rather than 400.

Bullet journals

Bullet journals have been a massive craze for the past few years. When I first heard of them I was in awe, bookmarking countless images of beautiful pages filled with painstaking calligraphy, highlighted with Zebra Mildliners in perfect colour schemes. I went out and bought a Rhodia notebook and spent hours crafting my calendar for the next month. When I finished, I felt a sense of accomplishment in my creation. It had taken me ages, but I was proud of it.

I took it to work with me on Monday, all set to use it to keep on top of my schedule. And then the client moved a meeting and I had to rip out the page and start again. Each time I needed to add something to my to-do list, I had to get a stencil out of my pencil case to draw a perfect circle beside it.

This quickly became a huge blocker and I ended up just scribbling in it and Tippexing over mistakes. And then I would look at it and feel guilty about ruining my perfect bullet journal and would avoid opening it to mess it up more, and ended up resorting to post-it notes again.

My bullet journal at the beginning of the year vs. the end of the year…

Bullet journals are the Instagram influencers of the organisation world. I’ve come to doubt that any of these Pinterest boards we see actually depict someone’s real-life calendar. They’re essentially art projects, not a tool for everyday life.

However, I’ve come up with a way to still be able to personalise my planner/journal and make it look nice. I started using Google Sheets as my sort of digital bullet journal.

I’m not going to go into the setup of each tab because it would make this post very long. Essentially, I keep a weekly schedule, a habit tracker, a log of how I’m doing with my Danish lessons, my yearly goals, and my spending goals. The same types of things people keep in a physical bullet journal.

The great thing about Google Sheets is that once you start using it, it’s super easy to learn to a basic level, and you can make it look good using custom colours and typefaces from Google Fonts. You can personalise each of the tabs to create whatever format you want, and if something changes, you can just rewrite the cell instead of having to rip the page out and start again!

I have a repeat reminder to update my journal every evening. I keep it on my bookmarks bar in Chrome for easy access. And this setup has really worked for me. I’ve already achieved some of my new year’s resolutions by March!

Don’t beat yourself up about it

Life gets crazy sometimes and it can be hard to sit down and update a spreadsheet. And that’s fine. The reason I’ve given up on so many other planners, diaries or organisation tools before is because I’ve fallen away from updating them and when I go back, I feel overwhelmed and that makes me want to avoid it even more.

If that happens, don’t tell yourself “I’ll just start it again next month” because those things in your to-do list are building up, and it’ll become a nagging concern in the back of your mind. Just start again now. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got blank pages. The goal isn’t for it to look perfect, you just need to be able to understand it.

If you do let your to-do list build up and it feels like there’s way too much to do, sometimes breaking it down to the smallest level like ‘get my notebook and pen’ actually helps me. It sounds silly but the act of checking something off my list spurs me into action. Breaking down a big task makes it feel more do-able.

So, here’s a summary of my top tips for organising your life:

• Consolidate all of your tasks and notes into one medium
• Use checklists to get everything out of your head — don’t rely on your memory
• Prioritising is key (and be realistic about what’s possible)
• Find a format that works for you, and don’t stress if you fall off the wagon
• Keep your inbox clean
• Your planner probably shouldn’t be a work of art
• If you’re overwhelmed by your to-do list, break down your tasks to the smallest level, and don’t feel silly about it.