Please note that my current level of organization consists of a set of skills or habits that I have slowly and painfully acquired over the years in order to combat my Type 7 problems with and resistance to order and routine.
The first thing to realize is that because you are a Type 7 you will need to change your schedule on a regular basis or you will grow resistant to it in a bratty way. So you tell yourself that you will have a schedule but you will change it if it isn't working for you. The second thing to realize is that you will have the tendency to yell at yourself with your schedule in order to overcome your bratty resistance. For example, you will find yourself writing things like "WEED GARDEN TODAY!!! DON'T BE LAZY!!" or "PAY SALES TAX ON TIME THIS YEAR IDIOT!!!". Don't do this. Be nice to yourself.
My organizational bag of tricks consists of a large desk calendar and three word documents entitled "Daily Routine", "Weekly Routine" and "To Do Soon". I edit these documents constantly so that I always have an organized routine but it is always changing to fit the season or other current needs, be more efficient or simply because I'm bored with it. Every Sunday morning I print out my Weekly Routine document and I print out my Daily Routine document each day. I print up a new To Do Soon template as soon as the old one is filled. As I go through my day I cross items off my list of routines and my To Do list. One of the first things on my daily routine list is to check my calendar. I add my planned events for the day to the sidebar of my list of routines along with a couple To Do items that I consider critical. (I should note here that I also have several notebooks in which I keep lists which are basically the equivalent of long-term To Do Items or ideas which I've generated. For instance in my garden notebook I might jot down something like "Learn how to make hyper-tufa troughs". ) Because I am self-employed and work at home, I sort of chunk up my daily routine into home/work/relax. So I have an AM housework routine and an AM business routine. Also I try to have a good mix of things that I can just do purely by habit in a mindless way and things I need to concentrate on. For instance, I tidy the house on auto-pilot first thing in the morning but then I switch over to answering customer e-mails.
Really the best advice I could offer you would be to join FlyLady and buy the book "Renaissance Soul". I have read a jillion organizational books over the years and I think these two systems combined will lead to the highest level of functioning for a Type 7. However, I will warn you that they do offer sort of contradictory advice so you have to adapt.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
