As someone who's always taken a fairly chaotic approach to life on the general assumption that my subconscious does a fairly good job of keeping track of stuff I'm having to get to grips with some side effects of aging, yet another country move, a job that features more metal juggling as the focus is broader and a growing family (so I want to spend less time on work).

The logical solution would be that there must be a technological solution to all this right?

Intelligent Messenger plug ins that I can fire off pithy instructions, Outlook rules that can triage my email and respond to my boss appropriately, a subsystem to make sure bills get paid on time and we always have dogfood and milk in the house.

Well, for better or worse HAL doesn't yet exist in a form where it can make my life easier so I needed to find a better solution.

My Dad had a simple rule. He would decide what to do with it when it came in - process there and then; file for follow-up (either on a specific date or within a period of time; file for reference or throw away.

Over the last few years I've peeked at the "Getting Things Done" (GTD) methodology (I first encountered it thanks to a neat utility called ActiveWords which sadly doesn't really do what it used to back then anymore) but while GTD seems to be very empowering it also takes time and practice (some folks say a year) to get fluid, and seemed to require yet more tools to learn. Which if they integrate perfectly with Outlook and Windows Mobile suits me fine, but most of them don't (or work with old versions of the software that I no longer use).

The neat thing is that I've been meaning to try to get to grips with OneNote for a while, and there's a GTD with OneNote approach so maybe I can combine the two...

Failing that... I guess I'll have to train my dog as my PA ;)