The other day I woke up around 4PM, brewed a cup of coffee, and sat at my desk wondering what goal I’d try to achieve today. I am forever drowning in a thousand projects at once and most of the time, instead of tackling only one of them until completion, I attempt to do them all at once, which usually results in nothing really getting accomplished.

So, I’m sitting there, and suddenly it hits me: I was supposed to interview Josh Malerman over an hour ago for a new episode of my podcast, Ghoulish. I found this especially distressing considering last time I interviewed Malerman, I stood him up then as well (read the interview here). Luckily, Malerman also forgot we were recording that day, so we agreed to reschedule for later in the week (the episode is set to drop this Sunday evening, which is August 25th for all you time-traveling freaks out there).

This will never happen again, I thought. No longer will my terrible memory and nonexistent organizational skills ruin my otherwise amazing reputation.

That very evening, I went out to the store and purchased a big ol’ planner. It’s nice and pretty and thicc. I spent the next hour jotting down deadlines and projects and appointments and classes I’m teaching and conventions I’m attending and so on. Afterward I looked at all the pen ink in the book and thought, Oh jeez I’m gonna have an anxiety attack now. And then I did, but after it was finished, I went to my night job at the hotel and decided hey, I’m already embracing this new organized lifestyle, why not fully go for it?

What followed was the creation of several excel spreadsheets: one for markets currently accepting short stories, one for short stories & articles I’m in the process of writing or plan on writing soon, and another for short stories & articles I’ve already submitted (a free version of DuoTrope, basically). Here is an example of my excel sheet on story markets (which could definitely stand to be further updated; notice the lack of nonfiction publications):

I even color-coded them depending on how near we were to the deadline. Like I said, this is a recent work-in-progress, so the content isn’t exactly extensive. I also plan on making another excel sheet for PMMP stuff, but one step at a time, okay?

Next up I created an account with Trello and downloaded the phone app (kudos to my friend Robert Dean for recommending it). From their website’s ABOUT section: “Trello is the easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything, trusted by millions of people from all over the world.”

I created three rows: TO-DO, IN-PROGRESS, and DONE. I can drag each task to its new row as I need to. I would love to show you a screenshot of these lists after I added everything I need to do right now, just to let you see a glimpse of the fucking chaos I’ve gotten myself involved in, but a lot of the information is private or can’t be announced just yet, so you’ll have to just take my word for it: shit’s crazy over here, y’all.

Anyway. The point of this post is to say I’m trying to be a better person at being organized, and if you were wishing to also improve these skills, the above techniques might also work for you. Give them a shot. Or don’t. Maybe don’t do anything. You don’t need to listen to me. I’m not your goddamn mother. None of this matters, anyway. We’re all just trying to distract ourselves until death blesses us with its sweet embrace.