Selling your Japanese car? Surprise, surprise, it involves a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy. Here are two illustrated guides to walk you through the process.

• How to transfer ownership (PDF, 2.5 MB)
• How to register your parking spot (PDF, 2.5 MB)

Mud + Olympics = Gatalympics. More info on the website and on the message board.

As of today, I’ve lived in Japan for two years and nine months, and in that time I’ve done a lot of things: traveled around the country, met interesting people, eaten unidentifiable foods. I’ve lived here for so long, in fact, that I only have two months before they kick my wife and I out. Despite all of the experiences I’ve had in my first 2.75 years, though, I’ve realized that there are roughly one billion things I haven’t done that I need to squeeze into the next 0.25 years.

Many JETs are likely in the same situation. Between working, preparing to leave and trying to enjoy the warm weather before it gets too warm, lots of folks are finding their schedules filling up fast. For some, this isn’t a problem; they just go with the proverbial flow and do what they can, when they can. Me, I’m a planner, so I’m making lists and marking calendars to make sure I get everything done. You might remember that I’m also a technophile, so many of my lists and calendars exist only as bits on my computer.

One item on my current to-do list is “write article about electronic organization.” Since I love checking things off of lists as much as I love putting them on, here’s a quick survey of some of the tools I’ve used (or have looked into using) to keep myself at least marginally organized in my last few months here. Not every tool will work for every JET, but one or two may fit your needs well enough to make sure you don’t miss anything important before you leave. (If you’re not leaving in July, I suppose you could use these tools, too; just don’t go bragging to me about the free time you have on your Google Calendar from all the not-packing-boxes you’re doing).

Desktop calendars

Twenty years ago “desktop calendars” were huge pads of paper that went on actual, physical desktops and were generally unusable thanks to the heaps of notebooks, pencils and half-eaten sandwiches people would throw on top of them. Today, desktop calendars reside on computer desktops and, while many still find them unusable, it’s for entirely different reasons.

Most modern desktop calendar applications offer similar features. At the very least, they let you type in appointments and to-do lists and sort your tasks in a number of different ways (e.g. by day, by month, in “agenda” mode). More advanced calendars have slick options like built-in searching, syncing with PDAs or mobile phones and the ability to share your schedule with others. Since they live on your computer, all desktop calendars have the disadvantage of not being very portable; if you want to see what’s on your plate for the day, you generally have to be in front of your computer. On the other hand, you usually have more control over a desktop calendar than a web-based one–a nice perk for those who like things to look and work just so.

If you use a Mac, you probably use iCal and could care less if any other programs existed. For the rest of us, there’s a variety of desktop calendars available.

• Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft Outlook is the desktop calendar/email client/address book of middle managers and bureaucrats everywhere. It also costs a lot more that “nothing,” and thus probably isn’t appealing to most JETs.
• Chandler. Chandler is an “experimentally usable calendar for individuals and small workgroups.” Translation: the program is still under development but works well enough to be used every day. Experimental though it may be, Chandler still lets you tweak your agenda with support for managing multiple calendars in multiple timezones. Chandler is also free.
• Sunbird. Created by the same people who brought you Firefox and Thunderbird, Sunbird (see the naming pattern yet?) is a calendar that, like Chandler, is still being developed. Also like Chandler, it is free and still very usable right now (even if it doesn’t have all the features of something like iCal).
• Rainlendar. Rainlendar is my desktop calendar of choice (and I have the screenshot to prove it). I don’t need all that fancy-schmancy searching and sharing, I just want a lightweight calendar that lets me quickly enter appointments and to-dos while I’m at my computer. Rainlendar is all that and free to boot.

Web-based calendars

Unlike desktop calendars, web-based calendars reside on some giant web server (probably somewhere in California) and are accessed using your favorite web browser. Web-based calendars have the major advantage of being usable from anywhere you can access the web, but they often lack the more advanced features found in their desktop counterparts. What they do share with desktop calendars, though, is the fact that, again, they all let you do pretty much the same thing: keep a calendar. Which web-based calendar you use is a pretty much a matter of taste, then (I’m a Google Calendar man myself, at least for now). All of the calendars mentioned below are free.

• Google Calendar. Google, not content with controlling the huge chunk of the internet it already does, released a web-based calendar to pretty rave reviews a few months ago. Google Calendar sports a lot of nifty calendar features (multiple calendars, sharing) as well as some advanced options that let you be a calendar pro.
• Yahoo! Calendar. Yahoo! Calendar works a lot like Google Calendar, except that every time I write about Yahoo! Calendar I have to type that annoying exclamation point. It is handy if you use other Yahoo! services, like Yahoo! Mail, since you can log into everything at once.
• 30 Boxes. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why 30 Boxes was named “30 Boxes.” See, there are 30 day boxes on most monthly calendar pages, and “Usually 30 Boxes But Sometimes 31 Or Very Rarely 28 Or 29″ is a bit long. At any rate 30 Boxes is another web-based calendar that works a lot like any other web-based calendar and also lets you keep track of your favorite blogs at the same time.
• Kiko. Kiko touts itself as a “dead simple calendar” that may be even easier to use than paper. I don’t know about that, but it does have a ton of bells and whistles for you to play with.

Online organizers

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m kind of an organization addict. Sometimes calendars, desktop, web-based or otherwise, just aren’t enough for me. Sometimes I need a handy web application that lets me create simple pages to organize all of my information on a certain subject–like lists of and notes on all the materials and applications I had to submit when I was applying to graduate schools last winter.

Luckily for me, a company named 37signals was created a few years ago and has given me exactly what I need. If personal information management was a drug, they would be my dealer of choice. 37signals has a couple of products I’ve used before and really liked; both are free to use on a limited basis and upgradeable for a fee if you want to do more with them.

• Backpack. Backpack lets you create simple web pages with lists, links and notes to gather your thoughts on almost anything (here’s a screenshot of my Backpack page for SagaJET, for instance). Backpack if very well suited to tasks like organizing research or taking notes.
• Ta-da Lists. Ta-Da Lists are like Backpack, Jr. All you can do with Ta-Da Lists is make to-do lists, but sometimes that’s all you need.

The old-fashioned way

Just like grunge rock was born out of the hair bands of the 80s, techies everywhere are beginning to abandon their computers and going back to paper and pen to keep themselves organized. Of course, being techies, they’ve created names and systems and templates to make plain white paper look and act as much like a computer as possible.

Paper and pen methods offer a lot of advantages over computer calendars: they are portable, customizable and have no learning curve. Kind of makes me wonder why I rambled on about all those other methods.

• Hipster PDA. The Hipster PDA is basically any small bunch of papers you can carry anywhere with you. I use a Hipster made of note cards, but others prefer mini-notebooks or simple pads of paper. The thing that makes a Hipster more than a “small bunch of papers” is how you use it: divide it into sections (like to-do lists, weekly schedules and project planners) and fill those sections with templates suited to each task and you’ve got yourself a PDA without the digital.
• D*I*Y Planner. The Hipster is not the be all and end all of non-digital organizers. Enthusiasts have created a whole website dedicated to organizing your life with nothing more than paper and pen. The site also features D*I*Y templates for your Hipster PDA if that’s the way you swing.
• Printable calendars. All of the above methods sound too trendy for you? Thumb your nose at all the Hipster hipsters, print yourself some good, old-fashioned, blank calendars.