I have been struggling at work, on account of several factors. I think, partially, it is because of the fact that I was on a Tablet, and then not, and then back on a Tablet. As I have struggled to get my groove back in the workspace, I have also been assessing how I am working in my IT environment and trying to find inefficiencies there.

My transition back to a TabletPC at work has been somewhat hampered by my innate curiosity with tech and my need to sometimes poke around in an app rather than just get my work done. OK, I admit my closet geekdom, but that is not the sum of the problem, I don't think. One of the reasons I insist on being on a Tablet is because I believe that I stay more organized. I should not be more organized and losing efficiency, but that is what seems to be happening.

So Friday, the day that I work from home, I tried to take a round-turn on my organizational approach. One of my issues is multi-tasking and the fact that when I come into the office, I start up the Tablet and then proceed to open every single inking app that I use. Add to that iTunes, MS Outlook, and then the parade of MS Office docs that I open and work in throughout the day, and I've come to assess that my firehose is set to wide-angle fog when I need to be putting down a high-pressure stream.

So I took my work week, divided it into 10 sections of time (AM/PM each work day), and designated a primary app environment to work in. I have slots to work email (which is predominantly reviewing work by my employees, putting out guidance to my various teams, getting responses back to my customers, etc.), work my MS Outlook tasklists, work and log things into my Project Journals (in Windows Journal), work long-term design tasks and organize items in my Project Notebooks (in MS OneNote), and shuffle quicknotes out to employees, team members, or the aforementioned apps from my scratch notes (things I write down in either a OneNote Sidenote, or more frequently, in Sticky Notes).

So I guess what I am saying is that, for instance, Friday AM is focused on time to work items in my Project Journal, and that is all I will work in. Friday PM is a slot to get things moved out of Sticky Notes (where I write phone messages or verbal briefs from people who stroll into my office) and into a proper app or out in a task email, and so forth. This will be instead of having 4 inking apps open as well as Outlook all of the time and dumping stuff into those apps all over the place. For each "app slot", I have a companion app to link to in the event that I need to do something that the current app can not accommodate.

So I am wondering who else has come across this problem and how have others dealt with it. I know that there are people who do everything in MS OneNote, or do everything in Outlook (without the ink), but I am not sure, and have not believed to this point, that any one of these apps meets all of my organizational and time management needs. I am comfortable working in all of them, but have needed a better way to focus and time manage my allocation of focus in each. I'll let you guys know how it goes.
- Vr/Zeuxx..>>