How to Use Colored Pens to Organize Absolutely Everything

Today we’re going to explore several different ways to use erasable colored pens to make everything easier.

Pens! I just love pens! I have big pens, small pens, and pens of every rainbow color. As a left-handed person, pens have always been problematic. The ink smudges the side of my hand as I write. Then Zebra came out with their Sarasa pens with super-fast-drying ink. At long last, I could enjoy the benefits of vibrant colors, permanent lines, high contrast, and all the awesomeness that pens provide.

But I couldn’t erase. I could only scribble. And scribbling through writing makes my notes ugly. We can’t have that! It rained on my parade. It harshed my mellow. It ate my homework.

Having erasable pens in 30 colors has changed my entire relationship with writing. And it’s changed my workflows.

Until this year. This year, I learned about the most wonderful, amazing pens ever: the Pilot Frixion series (that's F-r-i-x-i-o-n). At this point, I have .35mm Frixion pens in 20 colors, and .5mm Frixion pens in 10 colors. 

These pens give the best of all worlds—they dry fast, they are available in enough colors to make my inner teenager giddy with delight, and they’re erasable. Completely.

Having erasable pens in 30 colors has changed my entire relationship with writing. And it’s changed my workflows. 

Color is quick!

Color is powerful. Your brain can find and recognize color very quickly. (If you're challenged with color blindness, you may have to change up your color schemes to accommodate that.)

To get more organized than you've ever been in your life, you just need to use color methodically, and in ways that help you streamline what you do.

Use color to separate sections of your notes

You probably take meeting notes for all your meetings in a single notebook—hopefully, with a table of contents at the front to help you find the notes for any given meeting. (If not, we covered that in episode 459, Get Even More Organized with a Table of Contents.)

As you glance through the notebook, you can quickly distinguish different meetings.

This is a great system for helping you always know where to find your meeting notes. Sometimes a given meeting doesn’t generate many notes, so you end up with multiple meetings on one page of your notebook. 

For every meeting, choose a different color pen for notes. Then, as you glance through the...

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