After reading Dave Seah’s post about organizing to-dos with index cards I took another look at this method. I had used something like it quite a while back, but the stack of cards became unwieldy and hard to organize. There was a piece of genius in Dave’s post, though, that really struck me:

The advantage of electronic media over paper, of course, is the ease of reordering data. However, electronic media suffers when it comes to direct manipulation of overlapping data; there is a lot of clicking and dragging of the mouse, which is slow and makes comparison of data sets cumbersome.

Cards do not have this disadvantage, and their tactile qualities make manipulating them a pleasure. They naturally lend themselves to manipulation; when you’re dealt a hand of cards, the first thing you do is order them according to your strategic intent. Cards can be grouped, stacked, stuck together, taped, glued, and shuffled.

“according to your strategic intent”

Well, now. Isn’t that a remarkable way of looking at things? Dave is, of course, talking about being dealt a hand of cards in a game (such as poker or what have you) but the metaphor is a powerful one. Earlier this year I fell in love with a notebook that I planned to use to keep a running list of my To-dos. Unfortunately, the running list just got too messy – as tasks were accomplished they were crossed off, but some were deferred and left behind. Pretty soon the “list” existed on a bunch of pages, with one or two items on each sheet.

Looking at these islands of incomplete activities made me think, “If this was important enough to get written in this notebook, why hasn’t it been important enough to do?”  – more accurately, had it been captured and stored in the wrong place? In either case, the list was making more work and stress than it was alleviating.

Thus, I am back to the index cards, and work is fun again. I still have a lot of things to do, and sometimes I re-arrange the order to accomodate changing circumstances, and sometimes I realize that I should file a card somewhere else.

The nice thing about using the cards is that I do not have to re-write the action or the notes and I do not need to have online access to retrieve them.

Any thoughts? Leave a comment.

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