Planning, PIM, and Time Management

The first job I had out of college was doing "program management" (whatever that is) for the alumni association (whatever that is) of my alma mater (University of Rochester).  I didn't really apply for the job, rather I'd been hanging around the alumni office as a student volunteer for a while, and I was pretty much told that I should stop looking for a job (I had loans to pay) and should show up to work on Monday. They liked me, and I was thankful for both the faith and flexibility I got from that job--since I had also been roped into a startup (which was ultimately quite successful) at the time.My assistant (it was a cushy job for a recent grad who had live years below the poverty line) noticed immediately that I was intelligent but inexperienced, and she took a firm hand in bossing me around to my betterment.  I'm indebted to her (Barb) to this day.  She noticed that I lacked the basic skills for tracking what to do when, and she signed me up (without my askance or "permission") for a Franklin Planner time management course.To my surprise (and in answer to my protestations--which she intuited and interpreted precisely and effortlessly), she insisted that the cost of the class and the materials would be paid by my employer, and all I needed to do was file an expense report. (That was a big lesson too.). She had already ordered me a rather lavish leather day planner--which would subsequently become so much a part of my person that my business partners referred to it as my "man purse."  (The subtle misogyny of this ribbing notwithstanding, they were and remain very good people who  now admonish themselves and others against "harmless" jokes like these--as I do.)When I attended the class, I found that things that were mysterious to me had been mastered by others (a key insight) and that there were skills and systems I could learn to make their mastery my own.  The class was lengthy, but from it, I took a few key takeaways that I consider gospel to this day (and it's been 22 years so far)... with number four being the key insight from which everything else follows:

1. Never use Post-its. Post-its are, by design, ephemeral. Instead, have a place for the information you're capturing (see below) or don't bother to capture it.
2. Only have one calendar. I don't know about you, but no matter how old I get, I struggle with calendars and dates and weekends and such. (Did you know that the calendar repeats, but only on a truly odd cycle?)
3. Have a reliable method to record to-dos and appointments wherever you go. See below. If you can't write things down, you can't forget about them--so they will bother you and crowd your brain.  Always have a reliable recording method at hand.
4. Write things down so you can forget about them until you need them.  This is the real trick.  If you want your mind available to process information--and you don't want a brain filled with worry about whether you're remembering to do "that thing" or not--then it's important to write stuff down... but to do it in a way that the information will pop back up when need. Seems simple: writing things down increases your cognitive capacity.

Nowadays I can ask my phone to remind me on a certain date (and even at a certain place!) but Franklin did it with paper all those years ago.  Outsourcing my memory to a piece of paper was one of the most transformative things I ever did--but I could/can only do so because the system for doing so was/is reliable and available to me all the time.When the Palm V came out--and I had a need for my calendar to be viewable/editable by others, I switched to electronic systems instead of paper, but regardless of the format, the four principles above have been a constant for me and have served me well.YMMV.