All right, this is the last post exploring my productivity tools. If you’re still reading this, thanks. The project to organize and beat all my data into submission is still trudging along slowly, but I’m pretty sure I’ve covered all of the tools involved after today.

Oddly enough, my dashboard is the one tool that hasn’t spiraled out of control. What is a dashboard? It’s an all-in-one place to keep an eye on things important to you (not entirely unlike the dashboard of your car). As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, I use several tools on a daily or near-daily basis. A couple of them (not counting the dashboard) remain open at all times in their own tabs because I use them so often it’s just pointless to close them. The majority of the others have buttons on my Bookmark bar so I can open them quickly.

All of the tools, however, are represented on my dashboard. I use iGoogle to keep an eye on everything, going into a tool to do something only when I really need to. I have a tab to keep an eye on my calendar, my email (I often just respond to my email in iGoogle.), my to-do list, Google Reader, Google Bookmarks, and the weather. I have a tab that can effectively serve as a workspace. It contains Google Bookmarks and delicious (which I can search from iGoogle), GoogleDocs, and feeds from everywhere I post. I like to think of it as an input column of gadgets, the machine that changes the input, and an output column of gadgets. I suppose if I could add an image editor and a video editor to the machine column, I really would have quite the powerhouse. Other tabs let me follow my social networking sites, relax with a fun game or two, and keep up with personal-interest sites.

Despite having five tabs housing a total of twenty-four gadgets, it’s stayed pretty well managed. I’m in most of the tabs frequently enough that I can see when something goes wrong with a gadget and either fix it or replace it. (I just had to do that yesterday, actually.) I’m pretty ruthless when I realize a gadget is just sitting there collecting cyberdust. I work very hard to keep the majority of any tab visible without scrolling. Keeping iGoogle well maintained really has allowed me to keep working, to keep an eye on things, to keep me up to date, and to keep thinking about what’s important to me in my daily or near-daily life.

Keeping a dashboard that can connect to everything I use on a daily or near-daily basis has made it possible for me to manage what would otherwise seem to be an overwhelming number of tools, and I’m lost when it refuses to load.

I was looking over the to-do list that’s directing the clean-up of my various productivity tools the other day and realized there are only three things left: the notes (the work-in-progress), the dashboard (which is best left for last, anyway), and the calendar. The funny thing is: I thought I gave my calendar an overhaul earlier this year.

I can already hear you asking the inevitable question: Why would anyone need to overhaul their calendar, especially someone with no life? Quite simply, because I don’t just use a calendar to schedule my life. I do have calendars to keep track of my ever-changing work schedule, appointments, and upcoming library due dates. I have other calendars that help me manage my life, too.

I have calendars that let me track what work I got done and how long it took me. This has actually proven helpful more than once. I’m more easily distracted by rabbit holes than I give myself credit for. I’ve also had projects stalled out for some reason, and re-reading those earlier calendar entries helps me get back on track quickly.

I’ve tracked what I read and any thoughts I might have on it. And someday, I’m going to get back to using that information to review books on goodreads. I’ve also tracked my exercise, and sometimes what I’ve eaten, in an attempt to develop healthier habits. I’ve had to-do tools (Google Tasks, which still does, and Gqueues, which now offers that feature as part of their subscription features) that sent my planned tasks to my calendar so I could see everything in one place. I’ve heard rumors that the event feature on Srpringpad connects with my calendar, but I haven’t explored it yet.

Just looking at how I’ve used my calendar, you can probably imagine how many different calendars I had running. My calendar was quite the rainbow! It was visually overwhelming. I had to go through and ask myself if I really needed so many calendars, if I really needed to keep up with so much.

After a lot of thought, I combined the calendars that were tracking what I was getting done into projects and chores. The reading calendar got to remain just as it was. The calendar that was intended to help me live better went away in favor of using a website dedicated to helping you develop a healthier lifestyle (that has its own army of trackers, and keeps adding new ways to track and plan your habit-building activities). When GQueues locked up their calendar integration, that automatically took it out of my calendar, but a widget allows me to keep a list beside my calendar. Amazingly, it lets me see my to-do list without feeling like it’s adding to the noise.

Calendars can be very useful tools if managed carefully. It’s easy to manage, plan, and direct your life using them. But if you don’t stop and take a look at them sometimes, you can find yourself serving your calendars instead of having them serve you.

My love for to-do lists has been well-documented over the years. I have to-do lists for pretty much every area of my life. There isn’t a thing I do that isn’t defined by a structured list. At one point this past weekend (two points, actually), I had four separate to-do lists open because each one had a task similar to one on another list, and I was hoping to kill four birds with one stone.

The task turned out to be much larger than anticipated, and I’m still working on it! You get the point, though. I have a lot of to-do lists.

Knowing that I keep up with at least a dozen lists at any given point in time often causes people to ask me how (and more importantly, why) I do it. Part of it is that I’ve quested ceaselessly after the perfect to-do manager, and then I’ve figured out how to make it show my tasks the way I want them. The other part is that not everything on those lists is what they call an actionable task. Some of them are “someday” tasks. They relate to the project they’re listed under, but for whatever reason I don’t expect to be in a position to get it done any time soon. It’s listed so I won’t forget it.

What I liked about Todoist originally was that I could create these hierarchical lists of tasks. One list could be each step of a project, neatly indented to show what task went with what step. I could even put notes and links as separate items to keep them with their tasks. When the time came to leave Todoist, newly-released GQueues allowed me to do the same thing, in technicolor, and with my notes and links attached directly to their tasks. Both allowed me to set deadlines. Both allowed for routine and “someday” tasks.

Tasks have three ways off their list. Most leave because I complete them. Some migrate to different lists because they fit better with another activity. Some become obsolete because of other work completed and are deleted. (It’s actually funny how often that happens.) Some merge into other tasks by becoming sub-tasks or notes. I realize it sounds like a lot of work, but I really do accomplish quite a bit in any given week. I also spend a few minutes on Sunday and Thursday nights going over each list, looking for mergable and obsolete tasks to keep my lists lean and moving.

Keeping a maintainable to-do list, regardless of how many you are actually managing, requires you to think about what you really want to accomplish (actions), what you might want to accomplish (“someday”s), and the resources needed to accomplish those tasks. It requires you to be willing to see connections and to be willing to let things go. When it’s done correctly, maintaining to-do lists can be very relaxing.

Bookmarks are wonderful, aren’t they? A little bit of code that allows your browser to remember so your brain doesn’t have to. It such a simple concept. I used to create nested folders of bookmarks so I could find what I was looking for quickly. I almost never deleted one unless the site vanished. I didn’t even realize how many sites I’d bookmarked until someone turned me on to delicious (back when it was del.icio.us). I thought it was a great idea- I could move over my bookmarks from my browser, search them, and have them when I was at other computers.

Except when I finished moving them all over (clearing out all the broken links, of course), I had well over 600 bookmarks in delicious. Even better, I couldn’t figure out why I had bookmarked some of them to begin with, but I held on to them in case I figured it out. I didn’t want to find that I really had needed that bookmark after all.

When I started cleaning up all of my productivity tools, I had nearly 1500 bookmarks in delicious. I was to the point where I was trying to add bookmarks to pages I’d bookmarked two or three years ago. So, when it was delicious’ turn to be dealt with, I went through every single link. On the one hand, it reacquainted me with some great information I forgot I even had (those were promptly moved to Springpad). It also reminded me that some of my activities have changed, and I was able to delete nearly 300 links on that alone (seven whole tags- gone in the click of a mouse).

By the time I was done poring over each and every link, I had the list down to right around 900 links. Something tells me if I were to go back through it in December, I could probably get it down ever farther.

Right now, I’m working on gaining better control of how I allow bookmarks into my system. Pure links are still going to delicious, and one of my very few complaints with Chrome is that the delicious extension doesn’t handle bookmarks as gracefully as the Firefox one (which I used on a near daily basis). Links to information I need are clipped into Springpad so I can see exactly why I saved the link to begin with. Sites I visit on a daily or near daily basis are neatly organized into Google Bookmarks and live on my iGoogle dashboard for easy access.

Bookmarks are like notes- they shouldn’t be an archive of sites you’ve visited. They should have a purpose. They should relate to projects you’re working on, information you will need to complete something, or serve as reference material until you learn something. They should even bookmark pages that you visit frequently. Bookmarks are a live, ever-changing body of knowledge.

The other day, I confessed that I’m something of a packrat, a packrat with organizational training no less. I’m probably far worse about it digitally because there’s little room to stop me beyond the data limits of whatever app I’m using. My notetaking app is nearly always the worst, because I’ll collect clips and pictures, and then just dump them in (along with my own notes) and forget about them. So up until last summer, I had this note collection that kept growing and growing, and I had hardly any idea what was in there. What’s worse is if I wanted to look something up, I wouldn’t search those notes. I’d go looking for new information. I had created quite the monster!

Even worse than that is that I like investigating new note-taking apps. I don’t remember where I started, but several years ago I started using EverNote’s desktop app, which was great. I could load in all my notes and organize them. I could have searched them if I’d thought about it. I did actually manage to use them to get some things done, but those moments were few and far between. But then I migrated to Linux, where EverNote has never had a desktop app (and isn’t terribly interested in fixing that), so I started looking for a new app…right as EverNote unveiled their web app. So, I tried to migrate back-up files of my notes to the web app, with comical results. And I started using it to save all these notes that I almost never did anything with. But I couldn’t organize my notes in a way I liked and then I started having other issues, so I ended up leaving EverNote anyway.

It took a few months and a complete redesign on Springpad’s part, but I finally found a notetaking app that lets me just store notes or organize them as necessary. And it doesn’t have the pesky other issues that were plaguing me on EverNote.

More importantly, switching to Springpad switched on something in my head, and now I’m suddenly using my notes. There are still hundreds of notes in Springpad, but I actually search them when I need something. Notes don’t just go there to collect proverbial dust. Some of them end up linked to my to-do list. Some are dealt with fairly quickly as I work on various writing and research projects. I even periodically go through and throw out notes that have become irrelevant to what I’m working on.

A body of notes is supposed to be like a living organism, constantly changing. Notes should serve as launchpads to completed projects, or as inspirations to keep pushing you. They can serve as records, too, but even those need to be carefully organized and tended to remain useful.