When Rahm Emanuel was Chief of Staff of the White House, he had a to do list meeting every morning with 10 senior administration aides. There, they would review a stack of note cards, each listing a priority for the President, from which cards would be added or subtracted daily depending on what was accomplished and what had yet to be done. Throughout the day, the NY Times reports, Emanuel also carried around a notecard to do list in his pocket, “obsessively” crossing off tasks as he and others finished them. For a man who on average “talks with 50 people a day by telephone and sends hundreds of e-mail messages,” it was a tried and true system.

The research assistant in my old office was highly organized in a similar manner. She eschewed her outlook calendar completely, or any other digital organizer for that matter, turning always to her trusty notebook scheduler to jot down her day’s items.

Some might think it an anachronism, but I’ve noticed this tendency amongst highly organized people to revert to a physical to do list.

Jocelyn K. Glei, writing for The99Percent.com, has said “a key part of remembering what I have to do is physically writing it down.”

Recent psychological studies have echoed this thinking, but perhaps not in the way you’d think. Dustin Hax, for LifeHack, researched psychological studies on writing and memory:

“So here’s what happens: in one psychological test involving students watching a lecture on psychology (psychologists who work in academia have a virtually unlimited supply of research subjects — their students!) students who did not take notes remembered the same number of points as the students who did take notes. That is, the mere act of taking notes did not increase the amount of stuff they memorized. Both groups of students remembered around 40% of the information covered in the lecture (which as a professor makes me sad, but I guess that’s the way humans work). But the students who had taken notes remembered a higher proportion of key facts, while those who did not take notes remembered a more or less random assortment of points covered in the lecture.”

Removing noise and boiling things down to key facts is perhaps the definition of getting organized, as applicable here to day to day life as it is to test taking.

So as you get ready for work or school this fall, consider the physical scheduler. Buying one won’t give you the discipline to use it everyday, but for $1.65 at Muji, it can’t hurt to try. Alternatively, you can pick up 100 index cards at Walgreens for $1.29.

-Nico