For both work projects and personal projects, I try to keep all of my notes, research, and drafts in one Word document. Similarly, for both work and personal organization (to-do lists, time & financial budgets, online account information, etc.), I try to keep all information in one Excel spreadsheet.
For example, in terms of work/personal organization, I have a spreadsheet with tabs for each of the following:
- A tasklist for all work and personal tasks, including deadlines.
- An hourly time tracker for work billing.
- A worksheet for my monthly budget.
- Login/password information for all work/personal accounts.
- Home improvement to-do list, including budgeting and prioritizing.
- List of important recurring dates (birthdays, etc.).
By keeping all of this information in one (encrypted) Excel document and keeping it in the cloud, I have immediate access to all important information in a form I can access from anywhere, while maintaining a high level of security. (In addition, I keep local copies of the file as backups.)
As to work and personal projects, I keep all of my notes, research, and drafts in one document. I then use unique textual headings to quickly jump from place to place.
For example, I might write the word ZTIMELINE as a heading for the section that has all timeline-related information for a project chronology. Then, whenever I need to go to that part of the document, I just use Ctrl-F (“find”) and type ZTIME, which I know will take me to “ZTIMELINE.” Similarly, I could use the word ZCHAFF as a heading for a section that contains text I’ve deleted from elsewhere (chaff) but which I might need to use later. I then can cut text from one part of the document, go the the ZCHAFF section (using Ctrl-F), paste the text in the chaff section, then jump back to where I was.
I’ve also created macros (with keyboard shortcuts) that shrink and expand paragraphs of text by changing the font size from 12 pt (normal) to 2 pt (tiny) to 28 pt (huge), which lets me quickly emphasize or de-emphasize blocks of text. I find this helps focus my attention. For example, if I’ve written several paragraphs on one issue/topic, I might shrink them to 2pt size, which keeps me from trying to further revise that text when I should instead be spending my time writing a first-draft of the next section of the document. (Creating macros and keyboard shortcuts for attributes like text color and highlighting color is similarly useful.)
One Idea 