Month: September 2020

As I looked through my bookmarks, I could readily see that I needed Start and Save containers for my bookmarks. The rest of my bookmarks fitted nicely into three other containers. 

The first was Projects. In the Projects folder I gave each a project a name and any bookmarks for the specific project got placed in there. Projects have specific end dates. Compare that with my Ops category. Ongoing operations, like finances or family, do not have specific end dates.   Finally, I have a category for Tasks which encompasses everything that doesn’t easily fit into Ops or Projects. Task items are usually one-off items and they normally support other Projects or Ops. For example under the Tasks folder in my bookmarks I have a Fax folder where I can find my fax bookmarks for the occasional fax I need to send. 

With these five categories – Start, Tasks, Ops, Projects, Save – I have found that I can organize just about anything. Check back tomorrow and start to see how flexible this system is! 

Another thing that I knew right away, some things were going to need to be saved. Things that I started on and were not going to needed until later were cropping again and again as I reviewed my bookmarks. This was something I see a lot in the files I have on my computer. Many files need to be saved but they are only needed if something else happens. Something happens, then I need to be able to find something, an old bill or a doc or go in to old bookmarks and find something. After I finish working on something, I may save it for later, or for whatever reason I’m not going to need it. 

My Save category is where I put stuff that is useful, but is not needed until something else happens. Check back tomorrow and see I how manage everything in between Start and Save!  

As I sat down to organize my bookmarks I could tell a couple of things right away. I needed to have a place to put new stuff coming in. In GTD (Getting Things Done) they have an inbox and from that inbox everything is processed. In my bookmarks, I will often look something up and then I will not know exactly what I want to do with it. For my bookmarks I added a place and I called this Start and everything I want to begin gets dropped in there. Also, things that I want to research or further group, get placed into the Start bookmark folder. 

Tomorrow, check back and I’ll talk about Projects. 

I have had a file system on my computer that I’ve used for a long time. Thing is, it never really worked. Another system I had on my computer was my bookmarks and that never really worked either. My bookmarks where a waste land of useless information and I could not ever find what I wanted. It was frustrating. It usually took longer to find something on the computer than it did to re-create it. I almost never used my bookmarks. Maybe I had just a handful or two that were used, but all the rest of the bookmarks were unused. Worse yet, I wasted time searching for something and then when I clicked on it was wrong, broken, or was out of date.  

I had an idea that I wanted an organization system that was flexible, it needed to be. Bookmarks can be a messy type of thing. I was also looking for an overall theme to organization that would encompass some parts of organizational techniques that I liked and used from other methods like GTD (Getting Things Done), and useful methods like Marie Kondo’s system of  cleaning up your act. So one day I sat down and had a look. Over the next week or two I had some ideas. 

One morning I sat down and wrote down some basic organizational categories and a method of processing organization related things. This was the start of StopSpots.  

This week I’m going to take you through some of the basics, check back in in a day or two!   

Yesterday got the main menu pages and updated with teaser text. Today I’m going to taking a look at the categories. Later.

Got the Https change working yesterday and added a Start Page along with a menu item. Today I changed the name from Start Page to just Start. I am going to add to the menu items now the rest of the main menu items.

Start, Tasks, Projects, Ops, Save. Remember that. Later.

Organized. By Designed!

New day, new post. Just got the WordPress app installed on my web site and have connected it to the domain. Off to the races for organizing anything. Check back here daily as I take you through my processes and set out to organize this site. Then we’ll get started on just about anything you can think of, later!

This week, goals are to get the running on HTTPS, then get started on the blog first screen. My first principle (I think that’s what it is), take one thing at a time and do something with it. So if my goal is to have a well organized web site, then I am going to work one at a time and get it going. You’ll see. Check back daily.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!