I know that most desks or offices seem to run on sticky notes.  I step into a colleagues office and I see them everywhere.  Stuck to the computer monitor, stuck to the wall or in neat little stacks on the desk.  If you ask someone a question there is a flurry of the little pastel squares to find the answer.  People that don’t get to a sticky pad fast enough will often jot down information on any scrap available and just hope they have that scrap available when they need the information.

In days gone by, long before the advent of computers and even before paper was taken for granted people kept all of the daily business in a a journal. Every transaction, every meeting, every detail of a days business was jotted down and dated.  Somehow, with everyone using computers, handwritten information has lost its importance until its lost.

A good way to declutter your desk as well as save your mind from having to remember where all the scraps of information lay, is to re establish the use of a desk journal.  Of course you can go and purchase a wonderful, leather-bound book to do this.  That might work for you.  Personally I use a thick spiral notebook from the drugs store.  Here’s my technique:

I sit down at my desk in the morning and flip to the next clean page in the notebook.  I take a ruler and make a vertical line down the center of the page and the days date at the top of the page.  Notes, information, to-dos and even phone messages go in the left column separated by at least one blank line and then a horizontal line (I use my ruler for this line as well).  As the day goes on and I take action on any of this information, further notes and actions are made in the corresponding space in the right column.  This gives me one place to look to find any info or answers I need.  It also gives me an archive to go back to to find old information I might need.  More than once I’ve had co workers come to my desk and ask me to check my spiral notebook for a phone number or clients name.

As for sticky notes.  I still use them.  Mainly I use them to give information to other people and they hand me info on them as well.  The trick is to either transcribe the info into the notebook, or, more often than not, I just take a bit of tape and stick the note right to the page.