5 apps that let you stay disorganized—without the consequences

As an artist, I thrive in creative chaos. I fear empty spaces; I want every inch to have a different object in it that’s a different color, shape, and size. I get bored easily and seek things to play with. I have little patience to learn complicated menus. My mind brims with ideas and my studio with unfinished projects (no, I have not been diagnosed with ADHD). In the old days, my ideas lived in stacks of paper notebooks, stuffed into folders and binders, scrawled onto scrap paper. I still hold onto a lot of that stuff, and I treasure it. But I only have so much space. The main advantage of digital life is that you can be a pack rat and no one would know it. You can have all the books, movies, and music in the world in a little tiny pillbox-sized thing. rnI have a few favorite apps that rescue me from my lack of focus, or rather, let me go on like that but serve to stop the dire consequences that can result from being distractable. 1. Trello. It’s like Pinterest without the pictures. You make little cards with notes on them. It’s actually so simple that it’s not that easy at first, because you think “is that all there is”? You make boards and lists. My lists, ideas, and little things I need to remember go in Trello. I sometimes use the Export feature if I want to put them into, say, Google docs. You can share the boards if you wish. In a twist of irony for pack rats, Trello doesn't let you actually throw old boards away—you can only archive them. 2. Evernote. The second app with greatness is Evernote. At first I resisted using Evernote because I thought it looked hard. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You just write in it. You don’t even need to save, because it auto-saves. You can tag your documents and search them all for words or tags. You don't need to keep track of anything! It’s like making a mess without the pain that causes. You can keep images in Evernote as well. There are a couple downsides—if you want to write a blog post or something for online, you can’t simply copy-paste it, since Evernote, like Word, adds html tags. There are some programs that get rid of those. Another downside is occasionally the site goes down, and since you don’t own it, I think it’s a good idea to make backups. I do easy backups by copy-pasting and emailing the backups to a several email addresses—they can’t all go down. If it’s something really important I also keep it in my computer and if it’s major, I print it out too. rn3. Google Docs. It can be a lifesaver for some things. The problem is you can’t see a lot of your docs at once in thumbnail. I prefer to have more control over what I see. I use it for business types of things, like spreadsheets and mailings. It has a full suite of programs including word processing and spreadsheets, and offline capability. It's my go-to place for creating and saving documents. It integrates its spreadsheets with email, and should you need to mail a bunch of people at once, you can use Gmass, a program that's free up to 50 emails. If you're good with spreadsheets (which I'm not), you can do a lot with the customization. 4. TextEdit on Mac and Notepad on Windows, also Notepad++, are apps I use a lot. These create simple text documents. They add no html, and I jot down things in these. I got getting overwhelmed with too many Sticky Notes in Windows, so I opened up Notepad++ and made a tab for them. Now copy them into that document. I could put them in Evernote, but sometimes I’m not near an Internet connection, so, this way my notes can all be organized right on my desktop. The simplicity of these apps makes them my favorites. I can use and access them on different devices (except TextEdit, Notepad, and Notepad++, which are only on my desktop and not online). No more need to shred or recycle paper. Using these apps across tablet, desktop, and mobile makes my life a lot less complicated and calms my busy min. Even if you're a button-down person who can fold a shirt to perfect angles, these are great productivity apps that go far beyond organization. Best of all, they're intuitive, and you can choose to learn advanced functions or not to. Hope they can help you get control of your life too!