Organize your brain with Stixy.com

--------------- Now playing: Independent Women Pt. 1 by Destiny's Child ---------------

I've always had a hard time organizing my to-do lists, and therefore my desk, and therefore my brain, and therefore my life. I've gone through several methods without finding one that works consistently.

For some reason, I often find it hard to concentrate on the tasks I think I've prioritized for the day because I'm always worrying that there's an Even More Important Task that I'm forgetting about. At the end of the day sometimes, I don't have the tasks I thought were most crucial done because I was feeling scatter-brained, but I never did think of the Even More Important Task either, so in the end nothing really got done. That just doesn't compute.

That is not how to be productive, my friends.

I may have happened across a solution recently—time will tell, but so far, I like it. It's called Stixy.com. No idea how the name is relevant to the function, but whatever.

Things I've tried

In the past, the three main methods I've used have failed miserably: 1) a mental list (hahahahahahaha, that's a good one), 2) Entourage, and 3) Post-It notes.

There's no need to expand on why #1 didn't work. Does that work for anyone?

The second option, Entourage (my e-mail client), was nice for some things, such as sending me reminders that I could schedule, and giving me plenty of room to elaborate on the details of each note, but I'm having a couple of serious problems with it.

It isn't visual. And it's not that I'm the kind of person who goes around saying, "I'm a visual person, I need to see something to understand it," but for this particular purpose, lack of visual organization was a definite drawback.

Also, Entourage has been acting flaky lately, and has been giving me "your database is damaged" messages. Those are scary. I am backing up my inbox as often as I can. It would be catastrophic enough to lose all the messages I have yet to deal with, but to lose all my notes too might just put me over the edge sanity-wise.

The third option, sticky notes and other sundry pieces of paper, are my automatic tendency. They covered my desk (all three of my desks, actually). It's natural for me to grab a piece of paper and a writing instrument to jot down a to-do item or a list of any sort. But although it's visual, it's not easy to organize. Post-Its don't often stay sticky long enough, for one thing. Amazing how cat hair can affect stick-to-itiveness. (Of course, if they made Post-Its using cat hair as the adhesive, they might be on to something.)

In addition, I would always find myself rewriting my notes in order to consolidate the number of pieces of paper as things would get crossed off the various notes. Or there'd be too much to fit on the size of paper I chose for a certain item. Or something. It was always something.

So I've been doing some searching for online or digital organizers. I tried Evernote, and it is working well for some things. I do like how it syncs my iMac with my iPhone. But it's not as visual as I would like either.

A virtual bulletin board

A search for "virtual whiteboards" led me to MindManager and Stixy. MindManager, although it looked interesting, was not free, and that disqualified it, because I'm too cheap to spend money on something like that when I could continue using Post-Its for free. (I have a zillion Post-It pads in a drawer left over from a previous failed business; I won't have to pay for new ones for a long, long time.)

So that left Stixy.com. I like how it's built on a visual layout which is basically like Sticky notes on a whiteboard, except they stay put and you don't get marker on your hands.

It requires a free sign-up, and you do have to sign in to their web site to use your personal Stixy board(s). I guess that's ideal in a way because it's not sitting on your own hard drive, subject to lightning strikes or other hard drive failures, etc., but I do need to look into whether it's backed up anywhere other than their servers, which could also get hit with an errant bolt of lightning, just for my peace of mind.

You create a Stixy board for each category, sort of like you might have separate whiteboards for separate projects. For example, I have 6 right now:

My local web design business
Affiliate marketing
Other income streams
Personal
Computer stuff
Recurring tasks

You can see them listed on the left in the above screenshot. When you click on one, it loads that particular "bulletin board."

Mostly I use the "notes," which are the various colored columns you see above. You can determine the color, font, and other features of your notes.

I also use the "to-do's," which are little calendar dates. Once you create a to-do you can set it to e-mail you a reminder at a predetermined amount of time before it's actually due, which is great.

You can also add documents to Stixy by dragging the "document" widget to the board area. Photos work the same way, but I haven't needed to put any photos up yet.

You can share your board with others or keep it private. It auto-saves your work every 30 seconds, or you can save at any point as well.

The board is quite wide and tall—I haven't explored its limits yet, but I don't think I would run out of room because I already have tons of stuff on it and it's nowhere near full.

I've found it helps to have it auto-open in a tab every day. For instance, in Firefox you can "pin" tabs to your browser so they'll open automatically every time you start up Firefox. Then I can easily check the tab at any point during the day.

So far, I'm feeling much less stressed by things I might be forgetting. It's all on the board, baby!