When it comes to all of the infor­ma­tion in your life, what is the best way to get orga­nized? And once you achieve your new year’s res­o­lu­tion to get orga­nized, what is the best way to stay that way? Every­one is dif­fer­ent, of course, and one size does not fit all. But here are some tips that most folks should find help­ful in achiev­ing those goals.

Accord­ing to a paper by the Alliance Acad­emy, 83% of Amer­i­cans want to be more orga­nized. When we were younger, being orga­nized wasn’t as impor­tant, or nearly as difficult. Maybe it wasn’t as impor­tant because it wasn’t cool, not as much depended on it, or  we were just more care­free. It prob­a­bly wasn’t as dif­fi­cult because we had a much smaller cir­cle of acquain­tances, there was much less going on in our life, or every­thing just moved more slowly before things like the inter­net and wire­less hand­held devices came along.

What­ever the rea­sons, it seems increas­ingly harder to do now. Here are five things you can do to deal with the infor­ma­tion over­load in your life:

1. Deter­mine what kind of infor­ma­tion you have the most trou­ble keep­ing up with­Maybe you find it almost impos­si­ble to remem­ber when you have a den­tist appoint­ment. Or per­haps you keep for­get­ting that your father-in-law’s first name is Bob. Or maybe all of these are true and you think it may just be hope­less. Know­ing the scope of the issue and the type of infor­ma­tion involved is the first step in being able to iden­tify the best way to orga­nize it.
2. Decide what type of orga­ni­za­tional tool fits you bestOnce you know what kind of infor­ma­tion you need to orga­nize, you have a bet­ter chance of choos­ing the right tool that will work for you. If you are a techie and you always have a gad­get with you, then a mobile phone, tablet com­puter, or PDA may suit you best. If you’re a lud­dite, then you’ll prob­a­bly want to stick with some­thing like a Mole­skin note­book or other paper-based solution.
3. Put your infor­ma­tion into your orga­ni­za­tional tool­Most peo­ple have a ten­dency to want to keep track of “every­thing”. But you’re prob­a­bly bet­ter off culling out the stuff you’re never going to use so you can get down to some­thing more man­age­able and less over­whelm­ing. Once you have iden­ti­fied what’s really impor­tant, think about the best way to orga­nize all of it, and then put it into your tool in a way that makes sense to you.
4. Get into the habit of using your orga­ni­za­tional tool by estab­lish­ing a rou­tineThe more you use your orga­ni­za­tional tool of choice, the more use­ful infor­ma­tion it will con­tain. The more use­ful infor­ma­tion it con­tains, the more you will want to use it. See how nicely that works?  The best way to ensure that you are cap­tur­ing use­ful infor­ma­tion is to estab­lish a rou­tine for putting infor­ma­tion into it. When you meet some­one new, put their con­tact infor­ma­tion into your orga­ni­za­tional tool right away. When you are sched­ul­ing an appoint­ment, con­sult your tool to see when you’re avail­able and imme­di­ately record your appointment.
5. Peri­od­i­cally refine your proces­sEv­ery once in a while, it pays to eval­u­ate how well this whole model is work­ing for you. You might start out using a paper-based sys­tem but, after hav­ing got­ten an iPhone for your birth­day, become much more com­fort­able with tech­nol­ogy and more pro­duc­tive using it. Or, you may have changed jobs from one that involved work­ing with lots of dif­fer­ent peo­ple and required main­tain­ing a bunch of con­tacts to one that is less people-oriented and requires keep­ing track of tasks and projects.

Those tips may not help get your junk drawer sorted out, but hope­fully they will help you get your infor­ma­tion in order.