There's a lot to be said for using your mind. In the past, I prided myself in being able to remember everything that needed doing. Whether it was a meeting at work or a chore at home, I could keep it straight in my head. I wasn't a gadget guy. A Palm Pilot given me by a brother-in-law kept my interest for less than a month. Day timers sucked.
In the past few years, as my family, work, and projects grew, so did the burden of keeping track of everything. It came to a head over the last two years. I took two big, calculated risks: Renovate a rental house that hadn't been maintained in 20 years and help start a software company named ComponentScience. The former succeeded and I resigned from the latter.
Those two projects plus trying to help raise 4 kids pushed me beyond the limit of what I could handle (note that it was much more difficult for my wife Jerilyn). I became forgetful. When Jerilyn would ask me about doing one more thing, no matter how small, it was a teeth-gritting experience for me.
The tide turned when I somehow happened upon the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. From my point of view, the book is based upon a single, valuable principle: Get things out of your head so that you don't stress yourself trying to keep track of them. Your mind is best used thinking through or completing an action you have time to deal with now, instead of trying to remember everything you feel you must do right now.
His book goes into pratical detail about how to implement that principle. Even though I don't do everything he describes, I try to follow the basic principle.
So what exactly do I do?
Instead of trying to remember everything, I put it all into Microsoft Outlook. Most stuff ends up as a Task. And I don't simply list something like "Create blog". Instead, as the book suggests, I realize that creating a blog is a project and I enter the Next Action that puts me on the way to completing that project. Next Actions are important because they are finite, do-able tasks. You don't have to think much about them; you did all the thinking when you figured out what the Next Action is. You just do them.
For date-specific things, such as meetings, I put the appropriate info into the Outlook calendar.
So that I could have this list of tasks and meetings available at almost any moment, I purchased an Audiovox SMT5600. Remember, I'm not a gadget guy. But this is the first device that I've really been excited about. Using Microsoft ActiveSynch, I dump my Outlook tasks, meetings, and contacts to the phone. I synch the phone with my computer at home and at the office, so I have an up-to-date list of Next Actions in both places or in my hand if I'm out and about. I really like that.
Note that it doesn't matter how you carry out the basic principle suggested in the book. I use Microsoft Outlook because I have it and it works well for me. The important thing is that when you find something that you must do, you figure out the Next Action and enter it into your system (whether that be a notebook or some other contraption). When I do this, I feel less stress. The only things I have to deal with are what I'm going to do next.