Everything In Its Right Place

Because we're talking about organization this week, and because many of you are expressing various degrees of anxiety over this project, I'd like to see you all write about, well, how you get things done. When you have a vague idea for a project, or when you have piles of notes, how do you find focus? How do you make sense of piles of notes? What kinds of strategies do you use? What kinds of rituals do you engage in?

I have a friend who will do everything on earth associated with the project without actually working on the project (e.g. finding a program to organize notes; buying labels for files; organizing notes into files...you get the picture).

I have another friend who writes anything that comes into his head. He'll go back and make sense of it all later.

I will usually rearrange the furniture in my house or office before I begin writing. I will almost always clean my desk in a kind of literal and metaphorical purging of the clutter. A while back, I started outlining, which has radically changed the way I write.

So. How do you do it?

(As an aside, you all might find Merlin Mann's "The Perfect Apostrophe" entertaining. Just click on the pink play button to listen. Warning: there are a couple of swear-words in it, but nothing horrible. Mann is an organizational guru, and he has made a living helping people get their lives and their work organized.)