Someone told me yesterday that they could tell I “had too many tabs open.” They weren’t talking about my browser — they were talking about my brain, and they were spot-on.

Too often my mind jumps from subject to subject. When doing homework I can find myself down a rabbit hole because of a minor curiosity or inconvenience. Sometimes, I’m suddenly genuinely interested in something very different from the subject of my work that is still very important to my forward progression in my reporting, education or life.

To manage these fleeting thoughts and ideas, and to successfully contextualize them and integrate them into a useful form, I use the following:

A notepad on my desk: My short-term memory is awful. I often need to list out what needs to get done on a piece of paper. Frequently, I’ll ignore or discard them within a couple of minutes, but the writing helps me remember what needs to be done by day’s end. Often, if these lists are really vital, I’ll type them up in a more permanent form after I get my thoughts out.

Paper notebooks: I write a lot of paper notes in class, because it has measurably better retention than doing things digitally. I say this based on personal experience, but also based on empirical evidence.

Evernote: This app is probably going to die soon, which has reminded me that I can never rely on one piece of software to organize my life. But still, it’s pretty incredible: it allows you to create whole notebooks online that sync across all of your devices.

Within those notebooks you can write notes, save online documents or web pages, scrape and annotate text from the web, and even scan real-life documents and search the text.

Plus, it has a complex tagging system that makes your information easily searchable. It’s ideal for school, projects, reporting… really anything. Sometimes it’s not the best tool for a given situation, but I can’t think of a situation where I’ve had to retain some sort of information where it’s not been a reliable option.

Todoist: Those lists I make sometimes need to go somewhere, and it’s usually Todoist. It’s become a sort of central hub for tasks both professional and personal. It includes everything from “hey dummy, pay your bills” to comprehensive lists of assignments and phone calls I have to make. My too-often swirling thoughts make it hard to remember what’s important and when it needs done, so Todoist helps. Still, I usually need to throw these onto a calendar to really make my daily agendas stick.

Still, these tools are not a solution to my lack of a working memory or general disorganization. The only thing that solves those issues are mindfulness, active efforts at counseling/other treatment, and digging my heels into my self-improvement efforts through sheer grit.