We recently moved to a new place in San Francisco, which created a cascade of to-do items. The move coincided with the death of my mother-in-law and our daughter starting a new school–three big life changes at once. It’s been a challenging time, but I’ve managed to not drop too many balls, even in the thick of it. Here’s a quick overview of the tools and systems I’m currently using to keep track of everything.

Operating Systems, Calendar and Contacts

My main computer is currently an iMac, but I use a Samsung phone. Fortunately, MacOS and Google play well together. Google Calendar and Contacts synchronize well with their Mac counterparts. I remember the bad-old-days of manually deduping contacts after failed synchs (looking at you, PalmPilot, and you too Now-Up-To-Date Plus). The only contacts I handle manually are a csv file of addresses for holiday card mail merges.

Task Management

I started using the free version of Todoist a few years ago, and now I’m happily a paid subscriber. I haven’t found a better option for handling repeating to-do items, subtasks, and task sharing, all with an intuitive interface and perfect synch between phone, desktop, and web.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to get Google Assistant to add a task in Todoist–something I’ve tried to do a few times while driving. Anybody know how to do this?

File Management, Backup, and Synch

All of my personal, writing, and music files are on my iMac, which I backup to external hard drives, Dropbox, and Google Drive. I get by on the free version of Dropbox but I pay $2/month for extra storage on Google drive, which I use to backup and deliver large music and database files.

The only exception to that is photos, which I take on my phone and backup to Google Photos. I gave up on Apple’s photo management years ago–it’s just too weird and unwieldy.

Notes

About a year ago I abandoned Evernote and switched to a combination of Google Docs and Google Keep. We use Google Docs for shared notes like shopping lists and I use Google Keep for personal notes. Keep is very primitive, but it synchs flawlessly. Evernote suffers from feature bloat, note duplication while synching, and relentless upgrade notifications. I still use it to reference an occasional legacy note, but I’ve pretty much given up on it.

I would only ever use Google Docs for notes and other temp docs. My friend’s sister lost an entire novel on Google Docs (or possibly Google Drive). Google’s tools are cheap and convenient, but they’re constantly deleting data, features, and even entire products and services with little warning or recourse. That’s just how they roll.

Money

For years I used Quicken and entered or downloaded every transaction. This worked great for account reconciliation and taxes, but was a subpar system for planning future cash flow.

Now I just use spreadsheets. I use a Google Sheet that pulls stock prices to track investments and sector percentages. For cash flow I use an OpenOffice worksheet with a block of income and expense categories that I copy and paste into each month. At the end of each month I reconcile the amount with my actual checking account balances. It’s a simpler and messier system than using Quicken, but I can quickly see what the next month is going to look like (and if I need to move money).

For taxes I just download a csv from each account for the entire year and categorize the expenses manually.

Goals and Plans

For years I set annual goals, but recently I switched back to a “one goal at a time” system. I keep a big spreadsheet of what I call “life purpose projects” with different categories (health, household, financial, writing, music, etc.)–basically everything that I’m working on. But then I designate ONE main thing that I’m trying to accomplish each quarter. In 2024 Q1, for example, my main goal was to complete and revise a rom-com script (which I did…more to come on that topic).

I also track monthly and annual big-picture to-do items and targets related to work, money, travel, etc., but it’s been clarifying to have a singular “goal” with a defined timeline.

Paper

Most of my bills and statements are paperless, but I do keep some physical receipts, and there are always a few bit of important paper to keep track of. I limit myself to a single file box, which works pretty well. Everything else gets shredded.

Physical Objects

Okay that’s too big of a topic–I’ll save it for another post!

I’d be curious as to what you use and what you no longer use to keep track of it all, feel free to comment below.