Organisation

I've been finding it difficult to keep track of tasks and time lately, and this disorganisation has been making my work suffer from chaos-creep.  Fortunately my frighteningly motivated Maternal Unit visited yesterday, administered a swift metaphorical kick to the backside and imparted some of the organisation-foo which helped her obtain an A1 grade for her own Masters' dissertation. 

Tom's Planner

While the way we broke the dissertation down isn't really relevant to this module, Gantt charts are.  I briefly test-drove a couple of tools, but I've settled on using Tom's Planner as the interface was simple, it's accessible from everywhere online, and though I can't save offline or print from the free version, print-screen is my friend.  It should be just enough to keep me organised and keep me honest.

The Daily Rind

Another idea which looked useful, though more as a day-planner than for organising a project as such, is this 'daily rind' notion which riffs off a product that Muji came out with a few years ago, the Chrononotebook.  The idea is to take a block of time, represent it as a circle and divide it radially do assigning tasks around the rim.  Again, as a visual thinker and inveterate doodler, this appeals to me - I think it optimises the normally competing ideas of dividing up the day proportionally and sequentially, without restricting the amount of detail you can include.