One of my favorite things in life is organization.
One of the reasons is: I am very competitive with myself and I love being productive. However, one of the other aspects of it is: the more organized and streamlined I am, the more time I have.
The other reason is that I am TOTAL control freak. I like to have a bird-view of everything so I can better strategize.
On my last job here in the US, I worked at an office that was smaller and thus, didn’t really have a system in place. So, I found my own little way to keep myself informed on what was going on with me.
This started on Notepad – which is my favorite note taking app on windows. From this, I could either move to handwriting on paper (printing the pages) or using my Notability app on iPad (picture below).
I worked at an office that was dedicated to litigation, so, every assignment was connected to a case and I usually had a deadline. Because of this, I had 6 categories:
- Priority
- Status
- Incoming
- Outgoing
- Pending
- Working On
Priority is where I kept all my most important deadlines.
Status is where I wrote down all my time-sensitive assignments. Usually, to remind myself that I had to keep up with a reply or the incoming of an important documents connected to anything I had to do.
Incoming is where I would put any assignments coming in that day.
Outgoing is where I would write down any assignments I submitted to my supervisor.
Pending is where I would keep all my pending activities. It’s the reason why I would always copy the previous file so i kept track of it.
Working On is where I would write down how much time I spent in each activity. I had to keep track of my hours and so I would write the beginning and ending time of each section. By the end of the day, I would add up how many hours I had worked on something and transfer that to my Timesheet.
The other field I added was the date, my IN/OUT time and the total time of the week so far.
I have used that experience to create cute daily planners for Law Clerks – using my digital art for a background and palette. You can buy them at my Shopify or create your own using Canva.
Paula Camila Pinto 