BackPack, a Personal Organizational Tool That Makes Me Cry With Happiness

Here's the thing. I'm a very driven person, with lots of stuff to do (three kids, house, two official part-time jobs that end up being full-time because I enjoy them so much, and did I mention three kids? Under ten?), and I want to get this stuff done in an organized manner. My best defense against getting snowed under is to make a list, but I always, ALWAYS, lose this list. Every single $%&# time.

That's why I love Backpack. Here's what it is:

"Information is only useful if you know where it is. Your information is everywhere. Scattered across notebooks, emails, post-it notes, and god knows where else. With Backpack, there's a better way. Now Information is easy to organize, centralize, and retrieve. Information works for you instead of vice versa."

Okay, so here's how it works. You can "easily fill your pages with anything you want, from notes to to-do lists to images to files. And then group them however you want, wherever you want. It's organization the way you want it." Every piece of information you enter in is centrally accessible because it's all on the Web. I don't have to carry around lists on the back of cardboard corndog boxes anymore!

It's easy to set yourself up. This is what I did:

• Sign up. Takes ten seconds.
• Now you come to a quick primer of what you can do with Backpack. Your options here include learning how to make a new page, adding content to a page, setting reminders, and more. It's good to spend a bit of time here in order to familiarize yourself with what's what.
• I skipped all this and went straight to "Create a New Page" (I also tend to read the last pages of mysteries. Explains a lot, does it not?), where I found a plethora of nifty buttons all inviting me to become more organized. List! Notes! Files! Images! So I made a quick list of stuff I have to do today and we'll see how it goes.

I plan on tinkering around with this because anything that will save me from frantically scrabbling for lists that I can't find but have extremely important stuff on them is worth a thumbs up in my book. You can go for the free version, which is what I did, but if you really like it you can pay up to $19/month for the Premium grade version, which will give you more active reminders,more storage, etc. Worth a look.