How Trusted is Your System?

As I laid down to sleep last night I found my thoughts crystal clear. ..sigh..

My mind, probably like many of yours, thinks this is the most opportune time to dump. Who needs sleep, lets worry about what you didn’t do today or have to do tomorrow. What this really translates into is that my organization systems are leaking again. When I am organized, in the flow, documented, and trucking down life’s highway I can go to sleep within 10 minutes. Ask my wife, she is generally jealous. Not tonight though. This is cyclical with me. I do not trust the systems that I currently have and that causes a slow corruption to occur. I spend a week getting on top of everything. My inbox is clean, I’ve read, reviewed, processed, and filed my world away. For a few weeks I stay on top of this motion. Then slowly, out of the corner of my eye I notice one item….two items…starting to stick in my inbox. Is that mail by the door? What’s it doing there? An unprocessed note card in my wallet. It has begun. From this point it is a fairly rapid descent before my bed time becomes Andy’s personal think tank.

The disconnect occurs because I am a digital creature and do not enjoy a 100% paper based system. I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t mesh well with the way I flow. I am a note card user because I like to doodle around my thoughts adding extra metadata that no device does yet. My love for paper pretty much ends there. I like technology. It’s so ubiquitous in my environment that I should be able to have my world served to me through it. It’s not though, which means what technology I do use isn’t perfect and when you hit your head on the wall enough you ignore it.

That’s the crux. Once you find yourself using a system with distaste you will eventually stop using it in favor of keeping it in your head. Unfortunately your head is not like a database or a search engine. The conscious mind for most of us releases what it wants us to know on it’s schedule until you train it otherwise by showing it how much better an alternative can be.

As much as I’ve looked, I can’t find a system that works for me. What do you use?