Staying organized with color-coded calendars and Evernote notebooks

Chris Hardwick, a very funny comedian/entertainer/podcaster/etc’er, is asked in this article how he manages his time given the many things he has going on. He responds with:

I have a pretty good time management skills at this point, for sure. I also have an amazing assistant who is more organized than I am. But even before that, I color-coded my calendar. Green is anything that has to do with work. Blue is anything that has to do with something personal. Purple is our live shows. There’s sort of a pinkish color that is the podcast. Yellow is anything that involves press. Light blue is fitness.

I think color-coding your calendar is really important because if your calendar is just full one color, it’s going to look like an overwhelming mess. Color helps you realize that your events are modular. The color is going to tell you what emotional importance it has, so you can make better decisions about how and where to put things and balancing out your days. Like, “oh I have all green this one day but maybe I need to throw in some blue so that I’m doing some things for me personally.”

One of my biggest time management hacks is to color-code your calendar. It’s such a great way, as Chris points out, to make sure you’re spending time on the right things.

Likewise, Chris hits on his note-taking process:

I have a handful of notebooks. I have a stand-up notebook, I have a goals notebook. I have a house stuff notebook. I have a philosophy notebook — I use the Evernote clipper in Chrome, so I’ll clip things that I feel like are positive outlooks on life, interesting thoughts on sobriety or taking action. Just anything that’s for personal development. And within that I’ll tag things.

Again, I subscribe to this same method. I use both a real notebook (though, not multiple ones) as well as Evernote as my digital tool for note-taking.

What tools do you use to keep yourself organized and focused on the right things?