The other day I came across the results page for a "Back to School" Community Code Jam hosted by 32-Bit Cafe, an online community for website hobbyists & professionals. The Code Jam was a challenge to build a webpage about "a complicated concept you love explaining." Browsing through the pages/sites people had submitted was really inspiring - so many cool designs that broke out of the boxes I've grown accustomed to of what a modern website "should" look like, and so much interesting knowledge or perspective distilled lovingly into each page!

Some of my favorites included:

  • "Board Game Design 092", on designing board games that serve as interactive models for a concept or idea,
  • "I Luv Statistics" on research design, methodology, and statistics in social sciences, and
  • "Magic in Medieval Europe" on the prevalence of magic in the daily lives of Europeans between around the years 1100-1500, which did not involve much witch burning! (That came later).

The page from the Jam that was the most thought provoking for me however was Remi's Productivity Corner. The author talked about different things they have learned about productivity and systems that foster productivity, especially drawing on the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, and noting where their own perspective differed or the common advice didn't work for them.

I've seen other people talk about productivity systems in the past, too-- I'm familiar with the broad ideas that lead people towards seeking a "Personal Knowledge Management" (PKM) system and a vague awareness of some particular flavors of PKMs, like Zettlekasten or "Getting Things Done" methodology.

While reading Remi's site, which helped crystallize some thoughts I'd had over time when seeing blog or social media posts about productivity systems, I was thinking about how so many of the resources that are out there on personal productivity are intended to point people towards some higher plane of creative or intellectual output. Maybe someone using the system will write a book, or build a website as a side project, or maybe they are trying to synthesize their beliefs and knowledge about the world into a cohesive system.

All of that sounds awesome, and there have been times in my life where I have wanted to do those things, too! Maybe someday I will write a book, or have a side project with a lot of moving parts to keep track of. But for right now, I am pretty busy with the many moving parts of my day-to-day life. I have a toddler and a house that I take care of jointly with my partner, and I work full time, and we just moved to a new home in a new country, which is the culmination of an immigration process I've been spending a lot of time and energy and thought on over the last two years (or really, it's one major recent milestone along an indefinitely-extending journey).

It is a lot to manage! In recent years more and more people have been talking about the "mental load", the burden of all the behind-the-scenes thinking and work that happens to make a household (and especially one with kids) run smoothly. I carry a lot of the mental load in my household, though as a person in a queer relationship, the gender dynamics at play are a little different than what you typically see in typical motherhood reporting.

As I was reading Remi's site, I was thinking about how actually, I do have a pretty robust system for staying productive and not having my brain break open from all of the things I need to keep in mind to keep things moving in our lives. (Though let's be clear, I'm not claiming to be an expert on this-- doing it all without burning out and balancing my own need for rest with the needs of my family/household/work is definitely a work in progress.)

In the rest of this post, I'm going to tell you about some of the systems in my own life that make the mental load of my daily life easier to manage.

# Calendar

I am very fond of saying (to my partner, or anyone who will listen) "if it's not on the calendar, it's not happening". I use a digital calendar associated with my email client, and any sort of event that is happening on a particular date & time needs to be on that calendar in order for me to attend or otherwise do the thing. If someone tells me about a cool upcoming party, but I forget to add it to the calendar, I will forget to go to the party, or I will double-book myself with something else that does make it to the calendar. A consequence of knowing that every event or time-specific plan I have needs to go on my calendar is that I can typically trust my calendar - if the calendar shows I don't have anything in particular going on on any given Saturday morning, I can rely on that timeslot being open and available to schedule something new.

Sometimes I add things to the calendar that's just a "maybe", like a festival that's going on that I may or may not want to go check out that weekend. My partner & I are experimenting with setting up a shared calendar to add things like that to, so we can both remember community events we saw & maybe want to check out, but haven't fully committed to going to yet.

Having multiple calendars is definitely a digital calendar upgrade that has been really helpful. Aside from a "maybe-events" calendar, we also have a calendar specifically to keep track of who is doing wake-up/bedtime duty for our kid each day. Seems simple, but when we first started alternating days, there was a lot of "who's night is it tonight? Oh yeah, mine. Wait, didn't we switch last night and now you were gonna do it...?" that is now rarely if ever a conversation. Each day has an all-day event of whose turn it is, that repeats every other day. (So the turn-taking repeats into the future forever without intervention.) If we swap a morning or night, we change the event listing for just that day to reflect the change, and also the listing for the day the swap will be completed, so we can remember what was decided. Since it's a wholly separate calendar within my calendar app, I just need to check a box if I want to look at the month ahead and see what's happening without the clutter of the daily swaps.

# Shopping List/Meal Planning

A couple years ago we started using the Paprika Recipe Manager app to store recipes and use them for meal planning. Meal planning is still something where if we manage to do it for the week ahead, and we're realistic about our plans and how much energy we'll really have to cook after work each day, it really does make the week go so much more smoothly. But, it doesn't always happen. Still though, using the app has really helped in a few different ways.

First, we can store all the recipes we like or want to try in the app, and assign those to a day if we're making a plan for the week. The app fetches a copy of the webpage when you first enter a recipe, and saves just the ingredients/instructions, without the clutter of whatever else is on the page. So even if we haven't planned ahead, pulling up the recipe in the app is often a nicer experience than going to the original source. (You can enter recipes of your own by hand too if you want, or copy them from a physical cookbook.)

The app also has a built-in grocery list though, and really, this part is where the magic happens. We can add individual items to our grocery list as we realize we're running low. Or, if we've added some meals to the week's meal plan, we can add all the ingredients needed for those recipes in one go before a grocery trip (unchecking the ingredients we don't need to purchase so they don't get added, like the olive oil we always have on hand or standard spices).

After using Paprika for a while and getting in the habit of adding to & checking the list, we uncovered another hack: creating separate lists in the "groceries" section of the app for other stores that we may need to go to, like Target or a hardware store. Now if we have something we think of getting the next time we're at the hardware store, but it's not urgent, there's a much higher likelihood we'll actually get that item next time we're at the hardware store.

A cool thing about Paprika (that I wish didn't feel like such a treat) is that there's no ongoing subscription cost. You'll pay once for each unique app store account that downloads the app. We started using it when my partner & I both used Android, so we each paid $5 once there. Now we're on iPhones, where the app also exists but we had to pay for it again. I was happy to do that, though - we've gotten a lot of value out of using the app, and it still works great!

When I come across a webpage I want to save, whether that's an online store I want to remember to look at next time I need a particular kind of thing, or an essay I read that made some interesting points, or a useful resource, I save the link in a browser extension called Raindrop.io so I can find it again later. My collection started in a different bookmark manager, around 2013 maybe, and now contains nearly 3500 links. I try to add tags to each link I save these days, though sometimes I just add a couple words in the description that I think would be the kinds of words I'd search if I was trying to find this link again sometime later. Raindrop brings in the title and usually the page description, so that helps round out the search terms, too. Later if I'm thinking "oh, what was that article I read about that one research study? I should send that to a friend since we just talked about something similar!", I can typically pull up the exact page I want fairly quickly.

Raindrop does have a paid plan that surely has nice features, but I've been happily on the free plan for several years now.

# Personal Finance

# YNAB

We use YNAB for day-to-day budgeting. This one is a subscription we pay for, but it still feels worth it a couple years in. It helps us be more proactive with decisions about what to spend on, and ensure that our spending more closely matches our priorities than it might if we weren't paying attention.

Before YNAB, I had only really used Mint, and only pretty sporadically. Using Mint to track expenses looked like logging in every 3-6 months, categorizing a bunch of expenses all at once, going from "where did all the money go?" to "oh, I guess it went in these general categories; I should probably try cutting back on that a bit", and then making no actual changes. Repeat, every 3-6 months.

YNAB really pushes you to pay way closer attention to your budget. And it really wants you to do budgeting the YNAB way, which essentially means via a zero-based envelope budgeting system. With YNAB you can only budget money you actually have; if your paycheck & savings don't cover the full month of expenses you'll have, you can't assign your budgeted funds to all the upcoming expenses until the next paycheck comes in.

With YNAB, every dollar you have should get a particular job, including your savings. Now instead of a big bucket of savings that feels tempting to spend, because surely it's enough for whatever big need might suddenly arise, I have much more clear priorities for the money I have saved. A certain amount is purely for replacing income if I lost my job or became unable to work for a while. Another category holds money set aside for regular car maintenance, or home maintenance, or big annual bills or vacation. It used to feel like "something just came up" that made it hard to meet my savings target for the month, except it would happen ... every month, somehow? That happens a lot less now that we're saving for "true expenses" more regularly.

I will say that when we first started using YNAB, we weren't diligent about truly trying to stick to the Four Rules, and it wasn't really that effective. I was still living in the passive model à la Mint. We'd leave some money in "Ready to Assign" each month and use it as a slush fund basically for whatever went over. But those dollars deserve a job up front, too, and once we were giving it more thought, it turned out the job we really wanted for them wasn't just "buy more of whatever we just thought of wanting sometime in the month".

If you'd like to try YNAB out, here's my YNAB referral link - if you use it to sign up, you & I will both get a free month of usage if you decide to become a paid user at the end of your trial.

# ProjectionLab

For long-range financial planning and forecasting, like to think through whether we're on track for saving for retirement, or how a change in household income could affect our long-term savings goals, I've been using this really cool tool called Projection Lab.

You can use it for free, without signing up even, to visualize your situation and mess with the different levers under your control. (Like: if I pay an extra $X/month on my mortgage, how would that affect my future? What if I put that $X/month into my 401k instead? What if I took a pay cut for a new job, and lowered my retirement contributions - how would that affect me in the long term?)

Putting all the data in up front though for your overall situation can be a bit time consuming, so if you find the tool really useful, you might end up wanting to pay to have the data you entered & your projection scenarios stick around between sessions. I do, and sometimes I feel a little silly about it because I don't reference it all that much, but when I do want to, it's nice to be able to just jump in and look at things without a lot of set-up.

# Notion

I started using Notion more regularly a few years ago when starting to research and prepare for seeking permanent residence in Canada. The immigration process has a lot of moving parts, including a lot of very particular and high stakes requirements and deadlines to remember and meet exactly. There's also a whole world of things to learn about related to living in a new country or outside your country of origin that's not strictly related to the visa process, like tax and personal finance considerations, different laws, ways of accessing healthcare, etc. So I started keeping all that info in Notion to be able to reference later.

In the past I had been more of a devotee of Airtable, which is a tool that is structured like spreadsheet software, but given very neat relational database features. Airtable is where I've been keeping the list of books I've read for example, which I wrote about connecting as a data source for this site. But, I found with the research on immigration I was collecting that it was more suited to a more free-form text workflow, more like a personal wiki than a spreadsheet or database. So I started using Notion, and over the last year, I've been using it for more and more.

Notion is unfortunately one of the companies shoving AI "features" into every possibly nook and cranny of their software. However, you can email Notion Support and ask them to disable AI features entirely on your workspace, and they will! I did and my experience is at least 87% less annoying, with no loss in the functionality I actually want.

Some things I keep track of now in Notion include:

  • Maintenance history for our car (when was that last oil change?)
  • Medical stuff - tracking symptoms or meds taken during an illness, the specific urgent care place we like in town, etc.
  • Info on our pets, like the blurb to copy/paste to a friend who will feed them while we're out of town.
  • Gift ideas - things I am considering giving to others, and my own wish list
  • Kid stuff - like a page to record cute stuff our kid said or did, info on her daycare or note about communication we had with daycare
  • House stuff - how much rock did we order last time we needed to spread more on the parking spot? What's the name of the lady across the street? How wide is the porch?
  • Restaurant orders database - originally I was keeping this in Airtable, but I'm slowly moving everything to Notion that I actually care about. What have I tried at different restaurants, and did I like it? Would I eat it again?
    • Another page is "The Usual" - if partner A wants to pick up takeout for herself and partner B, but for some reason can't confirm partner B's order, what will partner B probably be happy with?
  • Sewing projects - what are the sizes I am thinking of making in the patterns I have? What are the fabric and other supplies requirements for those, and do I have them already?

# Dropbox

There's not a lot to say here really, but I've been using Dropbox as my cloud storage provider of choice for many years now. It does the job, and I like that my files (including/especially photos) are just files I can move around into normal computer folders, not shoehorned into proprietary "albums" that won't transfer to any other system very easily.

In the last year or so I read about the Johnny Decimal system for personal archiving and it inspired me to reorganize my Dropbox a bit. I don't follow the whole ID structure/naming convention really, but the main concept I took away was to limit the number of top-level folders and the depth of the folder hierarchy (though I'm not as strict as the system officially recommends), and make it so there's only one folder that feels like the obvious place to put stuff.

Photos are in a top-level folder, with a folder for each year inside, and within that, I try to organize into folders by theme or events, but haven't always kept up with this the last few years. But ideally I'd have a folder for each photo-worthy holiday, a folder for "pictures I took on walks", a folder for the cats, a folder of nice family photos, one for each vacation or trip, etc.

The photos from my phone back up automatically to a Dropbox "Camera Uploads" folder, so once or twice a year I move them from Camera Uploads to the year folder under 'pictures', and then sort them from there when I can. (In the best of times they go directly into the year's subfolders; other times they go into a holding folder for the year til they can be sorted later [...or never]. Don't put them right in the year folder unless you really don't want to put them in a subfolder, otherwise you'll have "intentionally no folder" mixed with "needs categorized"!

# Contacts & Addresses

This feels like maybe it should be obvious, but it took me a long time to start doing regularly. So I'm sharing in case you don't do it yet, either. If you are given a friend's address (email or physical/mailing) for the first time, add it immediately to your phone contact for that friend, so you don't have to ask them for it again next time unless they've actually moved.



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