Stickies (and similar notes-based organizational tools) are all the rage these days with 3 4 recent product launches:

As much as I want to like these tools, (especially local entry stikkit), I just can’t get behind them yet. I’ve tried using all kinds of organizational apps like Ta-da lists, wikis, Basecamp/activeCollab, all of the different start pages (google/ig, pageflakes, live.com) and their todo widgets, Google Notebook, and Microsoft OneNote among others.

But, as hard as I’ve tried, I just keep coming back to the same two tools I’ve used for a relatively long-time, Gmail (using drafts and yahoo mail before) and todo.txt files in different places (one at work, different ones at home for different projects). Using Gmail allows easy online access from anywhere when needed and the ability to upload related files, while todo.txt files are great when offline and when needing more room to process thoughts and lists. I find it requires too much effort at times to open a browser or another application. I’m reminded here of Cory Doctorow’s Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks presentation from a couple years back.

I’ll definitely try out stikkit because it looks like such an elegant UI and back-end engineering effort, but we’ll see if I stick with it (sorry, bad humor). How do you organize yourself?

Note, this is for my personal organization, when working with a team, I’d still recommend a tool like activeCollab/Basecamp or a wiki.