Jen Boyer

In the course of hunting down the ultimate time management tool, I’ve been trying RescueTime. It’s great, and has made me more aware of how I spend my time — not just my work time, but my evenings and my quick computer breaks in the afternoons.

As a mother of four little ones, and working from home, I find myself living in 15-minute blocks of Google Calendar time via my phone. If I’m organized, I’m a whirlwind of efficiency. If I’m flying by the seat of my pants, I feel low at the end of the day; discouraged by how little I’ve accomplished.

My mom’s family nickname is “the squirrel.” She is busy busy busy. When she came to stay with us after our twins were born, I noticed that she never sat down until very late in the evening, when every possible chore had already been done. In my sleep-deprived haze, I marveled at her productivity but couldn’t apply her methods to my own life.

Now it’s snapped into place. I am my mother’s daughter! If I sit down while supervising bath time, it takes a Herculean effort to get moving again. But if I spend that time putting away laundry, tidying bedrooms, cleaning the bathroom sink, organizing the linen closet, then once the kids are in bed I am ready to do some research, exercise, then get cranking on an article.

For me, organization leads to two things: motivation, and momentum. With this epiphany, I plan to make April ’10 my most productive month yet — and naturally I need to add to my organizational arsenal.

What are your favorite organizational tools?

Last week felt chaotic, with kindergarten registration, suture removal, and other family commitments I can no longer remember interrupting my morning work time.

Then last night, my laptop passed from this world into the next. I never even knew it was ailing. Fortunately I’ve learned from my previous computer crashes and now house everything online, so I only freaked out for a minute. Now I’m rockin’ a new and improved laptop and a sense of excitement about starting the next week and bulldozing over an enormous mountain of work.

My last big computer crash was in early 2009, and I lost a lot. But aside from the work-in-progress that disappeared, I lost the spreadsheet I’d been using to track my time. That was far more difficult to recreate than the research paper I’d been writing! Thanks to emails and Google Calendar I was able to piece it back together, but I probably cost myself a couple hundred dollars in hours I wasn’t confident billing, and in time recreating my time sheet.

That’s when I wised up and moved to Google docs.

Manually updating a spreadsheet, then transferring the hours to invoices, is a little clunky. Or a lot clunky. But so far it’s been a great system for me. I can update my time tracking spreadsheet from my mobile phone, and I don’t lose any information when my laptop inevitably dies. I’m on the hunt for a slick web-based time tracking tool with a mobile client, and stumbled on this list of 100 handy tools for freelancers. I’m giddy with excitement over checking out all those links!