New Year. New Tools.

It's day 5 of the new year and I've bought my 2017 paper agenda and my new journal, my emails from 2016 have been filed & archived, my electronic agenda has been reviewed & cleaned up as have Evernote and Todoist. The basics are in place so I can move forward, maintaining inbox zero with a solid well-run calendar.

My approach to email and calendar management has always been to keep it simple. I have had great success keeping my clients' systems basic so they can maintain the systems themselves, with little effort. Less is more works well for a great many people (including myself). Let's face it, we don't implement a system because we want to do more work.

I've decided to take the first few months of 2017 to test-drive productivity practices, systems and apps that clients and colleagues had asked me about. Some I will research and some I will implement into my own day-to-day system. There is no better way to test a system than to use it myself so that when I discuss it with clients I can stand behind my recommendations or point them to another option, one better suited to their needs.

January is set up. I'm researching SaneBox (an email management app) and I have already set up my calendar to include daily and monthly themes (calendar tactics that I learned of from Mike Vardy of The Productivityist).

Keep an eye out for my comments later this month.