Getting Things Done

I am having quite a bit of trouble keeping organized at work these days.  I am bouncing between a couple different clients and a handful of different projects for each client.  I’ve been doing a horrible job of keeping track of hours worked and then spend more time than I should need to on getting my timesheet prepared each Monday morning.

At home, I’ve been doing a decent job of plugging away at some of the big projects but not such a good job with some of the smaller projects.  I forgot my ATM PIN about a week ago and keep forgetting to call the bank to have them reset it.

I have tried using a variety of organizing schemes over the years with varying degrees of success.  I normally implement them enough to get out of the immediate crisis and then quit updating them and go back to the old “off the top of my head” time management system.

I bought Getting Things Done a little over a year ago during a big project crunch and was keeping track of everything on my Palm.  I worked reasonably well but I did not like using the Palm for keeping track of things so I ended up letting it slide.

I am thinking about starting up GTD again.  I have a laptop now, but think I am going to try implementing the system on paper and see how that goes.  One thing I know about time management, if I am not doing something to keep me on track I will quickly get overwhelmed.

The funny thing is I am too busy right now to spend the time I need to spend to review and set up GTD but I am going to work on the critical fires tomorrow and hopefully get most of that back under control and get some time to get organized.

How do you keep yourselves organized?  Do you use paper and pen or something electronic?  Do you consistently keep your system up to date?