I've tried this, and I am successful one out of eleventy billion tries.

I'm attempting to become more organized in my life overall, and I am ridding my life of paper. I've been testing this at work, and so far have enjoyed the results. I see more of my nice desk's surface, and actually have room for nifty gadgets like a stapler, a tape dispenser, and a computer monitor now. The secret? GTD*

GTD stands for "Get Things Done", and involved a system of rules for organizing tasks as quickly as possible so one can spend more brain power on actually doing tasks rather than sorting them. A sample rule is "If it can be done in two minutes, do it now". If all a person's tasks are two minutes long, then this may not be the system for them, but for myself, it is already proving quite useful. One of the originators of the GTD system is David Allen although much of his content is geared towards a paper version of the lifestyle. Since I am de-cluttering my life, this is counterproductive to me.

The overall gist of GTD is to tag every task you have into categories such as "Next Action", or "Pending", or "Future" in order to continually keep your to-do list very focused on action and less on having to re-think "what was it I had to do on this project?!?". I've found it very disciplining and fulfilling, and I use both my work email and my gmail account to keep it flowing.

I'm still trying to figure out why I am so much more organized on a computer than I am with paper. I guess if my file cabinets had a "search" function or some snazzy Windows-key shortcut, I might actually have stuck with paper. As it stands, paper....BE GONE!!!

I keep telling myself "Don't print. PDF." A USB Stick is my new binder, although it doesn't look near as cool as my old Trapper Keeper.

---
*It's a TLA.