So from time to time, I’ll be posting about the gear, techniques/hacks, and my personal workflows that envelop the gear that i use in the spirit of giving you back some time and increasing your useful time in pursuit of your priorities.
I wasn’t born yesterday, and I’d like to think I’m a mix between the old and the new schools – although some would say I’m definitely old school, others would say I’m just old, and still others say that I have a few tricks left to share. The truth is probably a mixture of all of it.
So why am I bothering to talk about old school and new school. Well, when I was coming up – email had just become something useful professionally in the mid 1990’s – this was just as the world of Alta Vista and AOL were snapping into reality for many. At that time, you’d get an email and print it out like a ‘real’ letter and possibly even file it away. I remember taking notes in a notebook throughout all of college…
Fast forward a decade, and now computing power and laptops are increasingly pervasive with iPhones and Palm Treo’s (there’s a story there….) quickly enabling ‘on the fly capture’ of inputs of a wide varieties – typically for me – into a random email to be worked later as i landed back in front of my computer at work or at home.
Well, I lived a dual life professionally until 3 years ago or so – where I would take notes and capture actions sometimes digitally (many times still relying upon email as the medium) and sometimes on paper in an ‘old school’ analog manner. This lead to a few different filing systems both digitally and in ‘the real world’ that had an artificial split between my professional and personal lives. To put it succinctly, it sucked as a system and it was source of stress.
So about three years ago when I was under a severe workload both professionally and personally – I decided to try a few new things. Professionally I decided to trash the analog world and go totally digital – with much reference material being captured in Microsoft OneNote. This juiced my productivity at work, and reduced the hamster wheel spinning when I wasn’t in the office as I now had a ‘trusted system’ to quote David Allen. At home, I still relied upon my old school mixture of email capture and physical filing cabinets…
Two years ago – I trashed it all. I stopped using email to capture and retain things that were truly meaningful and worthy of retention and began using Evernote for a totally digital retention/reference material tool. I have not looked back since.
It is ubiquitous across all of my mobile devices, it is fully indexed, and it does not lock me down or into their platform with the ability to regularly export content – if needed. The need to organize and tag is minimized given the search capabilities that are equally powerful on my various laptops and mobile devices.
The truth is that I do still have some personal files that I keep physically, but it is typically oriented towards a 1 year time horizon or less with longer term retention of physical records in support of legal or regulatory related things like tax returns/supporting documentation.
You can drop emails into Evernote for future reference, which dovetails nicely with the teachings of David Allen and of the Asian Efficiency gang. There is a set of workflows that surround this piece of gear that I’ll hit down the line – for now – get yourself a trusted online depot to store your reference materials for future recall – there are a few out there such as Microsoft’s OneNote and Evernote.
Evernote for me is the winner given the cross platform support, the richness of search, the ability to collaborate jointly with others on group notes and group notebooks, and the interconnectedness it offers to many other third party services that can serve as inbound streams – such as email.
Interested in your feedback on what you use to retain your historical reference materials in an increasingly online/digital manner or are you old school with a spiral bound notebook?
