Reason 79: Twenty open tabs

100 Reasons I'm Retiring

If you’ve been following these posts as I plot out the reasons I have decided to retire from full-time teaching, then you already know that I spend a lot of time at the computer. What with school work, editing, working on blogs, and polishing my memoir about my son’s grief journey, I’m often working on several things at once. And yes, I know the dangers of multitasking. It’s often unavoidable as deadlines for dissertations approach.

The result is that I often have several documents open on my desktop at the same time and while I don’t have a hard time keeping them separate, I’m not always good at putting them in the proper folder or giving them a descriptive name. Like pieces of stories or blogs that are scribbled on the backs of papers at school, I sometimes just KNOW I have written down a seed idea, but have no idea where I stored it.

Last summer, following a recommendation from my friends at Flourish Writers, I tried to track down all my elusive seed ideas and put them on a Trello board. It was a great idea! Unfortunately, too many of my ideas first needed to be transcribed into a Word Doc which proved time-consuming.

With my time available, I hope to track down all those wonderful story and blog ideas and finally put them in one easily accessible place. I just know the next Great American Novel—or at least a meaningful devotional—is hidden somewhere on my desktop!

Do you have an easy way to keep track of all your files? What’s your favorite method?