The best system is your own.

If you took a tour of my steno notebook (my beloved journal) you might think I’m disorganized. 

In one steno I house everything from goal setting charts, hand-drawn calendars, ideas, quotes that inspire me, personal journal entries, doodles, phone numbers & addresses, and the list goes on.

A mash-up.

This could lead to me not being able to find those ideas I wrote down or the items on the to do list to cross off after completion, but I’m learning how to work my “weaknesses”* and turn them into strengths.

Starting with my inclination towards mash-up messiness, I then created a system involving revisiting my entries as a means to jog my memory and re-inspire me (I call this structured inspiration). The second time around I denote that the idea has been revisited, edited, typed into a permanent home in my computer or ditched. There’s something utterly satisfying about this whole process.

Sure I could just type up all these various steno-fied things to begin with and house them immediately in my, admittedly, hyper-organized computer files. Or I could write them down and never revisit them, letting them sleep soundly forever in the pages of the steno (which was my previous, unproductive, system).

Instead, I’ve found the happy place where my “natural” inclinations to be somewhat messy, mash-up ideas with personal entries and off-the-cuff writings have merged with my desire to be inspired, organized, and productive in creating my life’s work.

The best system is our own. Learn how to maximize your own ways of working by finding the intersection between your natural or habitual tendencies and your ultimate desires (what you want to be, do, and have).

  

*I don’t think of this as a weakness at all, but occasionally there’s a societal whisper in my ear that says, “what a mess.”

Photo Credit: Hometown Beauty