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.

I have always struggled with getting work done, organizing my thoughts and overcoming the most arduous tasks. The YouTube cooking tutorial, late-night Wikipedia binge on serial killer trivia or my suddenly rekindled interest in the fundamentals of papercraft can and should wait, but when they present a welcome distraction, I often opt for them instead of the transcription I’ve been putting off, or the 60-page reading I’ve known about for two weeks.

You can’t procrastinate in reporting, though. I have no issues with spot news—when that arises, my adrenaline pumps and I can churn a piece out like anyone else. It’s when there are tasks floating in the background of my brain that I’ll find other things to while away the hours. Eventually, I catch myself hours or sometimes minutes from a deadline and rally, but in graduate school this is an unsustainable practice.

I’m purpose-driven, so I resolved to overcome this tendency toward procrastination years ago when deciding I wanted to go into journalism. Here’s what I’ve done to keep myself on level:

• Pursue counseling. While this is not the ideal solution for everyone, I find that having someone to blabber to about my issues on a weekly basis and seek out solutions with can be a real boon to my productivity and general ability to handle my workload.
• Plan every day. The work of a reporter at its core requires a willingness to drop what you’re doing and refocus. Too often, I go about my days floating from task to task. Whatever has the most pizazz on my to-do list gets done as it pops into my brain, leaving things like homework and grocery shopping undone until the deadline. After years, I’ve finally found a piece of software that works with my brain. I plan every class task ahead of time, and then dump what needs done on a given day in the “today” section, then dropping that on a calendar so I know what gets done when. One thing I’m still bad at: estimating the time needed per task.
• Create personal time. Specifically, create it in the morning. As a J7450 student, we’re required to read the Missourian and competitors every morning, which is unquestionably a good idea. That morning time, I have learned, is also a good space to drink some coffee, read my favorite newsletters and breathe. Too often I procrastinate simply out of a desire to turn off my brain and take a minute for myself—so now, I do my best to create those minutes early in the day.
• Have a reference point. What I’ve just described is the ideal of a given day. Rarely does it go that way—often, I rush out the door after oversleeping. My workload, unfortunately, doesn’t magically lighten itself if I waste time. On days like this, I try to have at the very least a place to go to reorient myself, so that I can reference everything in my life and what should be prioritized when. Todoist is good about this too—I’ve shopped around, trying different apps and notebook workflows like clockwork, for years. Perhaps it’s too tool-focused an approach, but I’ve now found a piece of software that fits how my brain works.

I’ll spend some time in the future talking about how I use these tools to manage my reporting. ttfn.

I’m dedicated to this field, but golly it can be exhausting.

As a graduate student at MU, I have to balance the personal, professional and the academic.

Personal entails what most people have in their lives: groceries, laundry, and – when time permits – a nice hike with friends at Rock Bridge State Park (time rarely permits.)

In a way, planning for graduate school courses is easy. Class times are preset, and at-home assignments like readings and essays are plannable, assuming nothing goes wrong (things can go wrong.)

Reporting is the most difficult thing to consider, though. In some ways, it would be easier on a nine-to-five, I think. While you’re always “on,” in a normal job you know what hours you absolutely will be working and what hours you usually have to yourself.

While we have required general assignment shifts once every two weeks in 7450 that come with very clear time requirements, our beat is different. It is meant to fill in the time a schedule that has nothing else in it. Even with only 3 classes and a part-time assistantship, that time can be very difficult to find. I’m still adjusting, and any time I’m sitting and not working on a piece or some homework I worry I’m not doing enough. I’m sure that feeling will reduce with time.

On top of that, though, comes immense financial pressure and a sprinkling of existential dread about post-graduate employment. Then again, I did sign up for a master’s program at a damn good J-school—nobody said it would be easy.

I’ve been forced to confront my own errors, and I like it. The adherence to respect for “the facts” that comes with studying at an actual journalism school has hit me hard. Before stepping onto the MU campus, I rarely put much thought into how the facts beneath words and thoughts were transferred from reality to a reporter’s notebook to a published piece online.

At the University of Maryland—Baltimore County, my alma mater, I learned the basics of reporting largely from my peers, practice or from reading in my spare time (something I am notoriously bad at doing.) The two English department professors of the practice that I learned from emphasized curt prose, a direct and confrontational attitude toward those in power and the importance of crossing fault lines. They did not emphasize workflow or the function of our work in the real world.

At The Retriever Weekly, our student paper, there were no accuracy checks nor many editors who had the time or ability to check every statement. Reporters there wrote whatever they wanted with reckless abandon, unless it struck an editor as offensive or inappropriate for the audience. That is the sort of editing process you get when there is no journalistic authority cultivating a culture of professionalism and of strict adherence to what is just and correct.

I can think back to pieces I ran as editor that I probably should not have, and that probably had some kind of negative effect on someone’s life. I regret the errors, all of them—while at the time I dismissed such mistakes as “part of being a college paper,” I understand now the gravity of a wrong number or claim and how that can overturn an individual’s livelihood.

MU, by contrast, has institutionalized a respect for the truth, and it bleeds into the practice of reporting at all times and at all levels.

In the pre-semester boot camp, we learned of accuracy checks. We were told that most reporters would be shocked by the level of error in their stories were they all to carry such checks out.

We were run through a fictional drill in which we were expected to get detail after detail correct, and as a group and as individuals we failed, and hard. The exercise was, of course, slanted out of our favor. Still, my stomach turned when I was chastised for my failings. I know others’ did, too.

In accuracy checks since, I’ve found my own errors and have been forced to confront the seriousness of a misplaced word or concept. I am still uncomfortable with some changes to my copy – changing a word to be more accurate to the source’s intent than to exactly what I heard, for example, still grates me even if sometimes making that change is the right thing to do – but these changes have made me confront the fact that my credibility lies not with adherence to my observations, necessarily, but to how I carry myself as a reporter.

Today, in lecture, Katherine Reed (who, presumably, is reading this) mentioned something that stuck in my brain. Two common complaints she receives: Missourian reporters either were wasting a source’s time, or seemed uninformed on a subject.

I recognize that these sources are a part of our audience. I recognize that their credibility and negative view of us matters, should we come off as unprepared or lacking in readiness for a given interview. As a valuable member of the community, their word will spread. Yet I worry about managing perceptions on the part of sources to such a degree.

To come off as dumb to a given source doesn’t bother me—if anything, it often results in quotes wherein they walk me through technical terminology step-by-step, which can be super valuable. At times, a perception of “normie-ness” from a source can be an asset. I’d argue even that coming off as unintelligent or uninterested can, at times, lead to a better result with better verbiage on the part of a source. It can lead, in other words, to a better story for the reader.

That said, I don’t think that’s what Katherine was getting at. For certain, it’s true that a lot of people don’t really want to waste their time answering questions that a reporter should have answered themselves. Yet is asking questions to reach a deep understanding of an issue not what we do? Should we not sometimes push people to minor annoyance intentionally, even if it results in some awkwardness or even a negative interpersonal relationship? It’s an interesting thing to think about.