ADDlepated

I spent the better part of today setting up and organizing my new Wikispace. See, I've been on the verge of a bit of an ADD meltdown lately, coming up with one neat idea (at least, neat to me) after another that I IN NO WAY have time to do, getting overwhelmed and feeling like since I don't have time for new things I don't have time for ANYTHING, because I have no filter sometimes when it comes to deciding what's the most worthy of my time at a given moment. Instead of freaking out and doing something stupid and potentially publicly humiliating (again), I managed to step back, take a deep breath, and experiment with ways to track my ideas so that they can leave me alone and let me get on with my life until I have time for them.

I started out with multiple Tada Lists for every potential project that's been nagging at me, but the to do list structure made me feel pressured and wasn't helping at all with the prioritization part. From there I clicked on over to Back Pack, a promised "information organizer." Eureka! This was exactly what I was looking for! I opened an account and started dumping my brain into it right away, but then I discovered it only had room for so much of my brain unless I wanted to pay a monthly fee. Bummer.

Really, said fee was pretty reasonable ($5/month for up to 25 pages) for such an awesome service; but if you read my personal finance blog, you already know I'm cheap frugal. So I hunted around for a free version.

After checking out several Wiki-type sites, one of which is exactly the same platform used by Wikipedia, and most of which confused the poo out of me, I stumbled upon Wiki Spaces. It's just as easy to use as Back Pack, and you get to create an unlimited (up to 10MB) amount of pages for the low, low price of FREE! And we have a winner.

I actually only set up what's there so far in less than half an hour. The basic idea here is that when I get an idea for a project, story, article, new blog, whatever, I add it to the list on the main page, and then as those ideas start to flesh out I can give them their very own page for brainstorming, etc. The big hope is that A) once I get these ideas down, they'll shut up and leave me alone so I can work on what actually needs doing, B) fleshing them out in this manner will help me decide which are worth doing, and C) new toy! Shiny!

At any rate, whether it works in the long run, it's gotten me down off the ledge for the time being. And I'm feeling much better now, thanks.