On writing notes to myself

I tend to work on a lot of different tasks at the same time. On any given day, it's not unusual for me to be in the middle of 5 books, have 4 different knitting projects started, or a big to-do list for the day. In some ways, this helps me have something interesting to do (or a good excuse for a distraction) at any moment. On the other hand, it makes me seem incredibly scatter-brained. To help me remember what I'm supposed to do next, I often leave myself notes.

I use a lot of sticky notes. I leave myself notes on my computer monitor, on the walls surrounding my desk, in my notebooks for the classes I teach and in my mail box. I also send myself e-mails so that I don't forget to do something really important. It's not that I'm forgetful, I'm just easily distracted by things like bunnies, cake and a good conversation.

In working on Geraldine, I've found that I tend to write myself a lot of notes in the drafts of each of my chapters. It would be easy to use the comment feature of Word for leaving myself notes, but it requires me to click too many things and messes up my margins (which messes up my page count and the satisfaction that comes with writing another paragraph, page, or section). Instead, I write myself messages in bold throughout my chapter. What kinds of notes do I write to myself?

Things like:
- add more data here
- this sounds like crap, fix it later
- add an example from the green sticky note on my office wall here
- citation?
- dude, are you mental? That's not convincing...
- year?
- check spelling
- did that make any sense?
- do I need this?

Whenever I take a break from working on a chapter, the notes to myself are usually a big help. I also tend to leave myself an outline of what to work on next, such as explain x, y, and z. Sometimes my notes are very sarcastic, and they make me laugh. Other times, they require me to do more work than I feel like doing and they stick around for a long time. Since I put everything in bold, it's easy to find my notes and delete them before I give a copy to anyone for review.

With the exception of a few notes to myself, such as add a crap load of data from crazy Irish finger names here, I am finally done with chapter 5: Indo-European historical data. It`s been a pain to write, but I finally have a full draft to send off to Indy. THANK GOD! I also wrote the intro chapter. I hope Indy likes Valentine`s Day, because he`s about to receive an e-mail with a ton of files, including a complete draft of chapters 1-5. Perhaps the next note to myself should be: eat a cupcake.