Okay, let’s talk about this Crystal McKeller thing. It’s actually not about a person directly, but more about a method I sort of stumbled upon, or maybe adapted, that I mentally tagged with that name. It stuck in my head for some reason. It was all about trying to get my project notes organized.
The Mess Before
So, picture this: I had notes everywhere. Scraps of paper, random text files on my desktop, entries in three different apps on my phone. When I needed to find something specific about a project, especially one from months ago, it was a nightmare. I’d spend ages just searching, clicking through folders, trying to remember what I called that one file. It was wasting so much time.
Trying Something New
I needed a system, any system really. I think I saw a comment somewhere, or maybe pieced it together from a couple of blog posts – honestly can’t recall exactly where the ‘McKeller’ association came from, might have just been a name I saw around that time. The core idea that stuck was super simple: date everything and tag it simply.
Here’s what I actually did, step-by-step:
- Consolidation First: I decided to pick ONE place for all future notes. I chose a simple notes app that syncs between my computer and phone. Getting existing notes into it was the first hurdle. I spent a whole weekend just copying and pasting, typing up paper notes. It was tedious, really tedious.
- The ‘McKeller’ Twist (as I called it): Every single new note started with the date. Like, `YYYY-MM-DD – Subject`. So easy to see when I wrote it.
- Simple Tags: After the date and subject, I just added simple tags at the end. Stuff like `#projectX`, `#idea`, `#meeting`, `#clientY`. Nothing complicated. Just basic keywords I knew I might search for later.
- Putting it into Practice: The hardest part wasn’t setting it up, it was sticking to it. For the first few weeks, I kept forgetting the date or the tags. I’d find notes from a meeting days later and have to go back and format them properly. I put a sticky note on my monitor: “DATE + TAGS!”
Did it Work?
Yeah, surprisingly well, actually. It sounds almost too simple, right? But that’s why it worked for me. It wasn’t some complex system I’d abandon after a week.
Finding things now is so much faster. I just search the app using a date range or one of those simple tags. If I need all notes for `#projectX`, boom, they show up chronologically. If I remember talking about something last Tuesday, I can narrow it down by date.
It’s not perfect. Sometimes I forget a tag, or my subject line is vague. But compared to the chaos before? It’s a huge improvement. It just took that initial effort to gather everything and then the discipline to stick to the simple format.
So, that’s my experience with what I ended up calling the ‘McKeller method’ in my head. Just a straightforward way I tried to bring some order to my own mess. Took some grunt work upfront, but totally worth it for me.
