• Software,  Tools

    Evernote: My Maintenance Routine

    Even though Evernote has some serious disadvantages (see Evernote: Love, Hate, and Usage), it is still my chosen note software. Today I wanted to show you how I use Evernote so that things are manageable. When I first started using Evernote seriously, I researched the best practices. Why re-invent the wheel, after all? The best practice at the time was to have a few notebooks and then use tags to classify everything. This didn't work for me, because I couldn't find what I was looking for most of the time, and a single breakdown in tagging caused information to get lost. I also found that I couldn't efficiently clean out old unneeded information, and that just made everything worse. Now I have multiple notebooks. If something gets mis-tagged, or lacks a tag, I can still look through the notebook to find it. Plus having multiple notebooks allows…

  • Software,  Tools

    Evernote: Love, Hate and Usage

    Have you ever bookmarked a website, to return later and find that it is gone? Or wished that you could make notes on a website and save it? These are the primary reasons to use a notebook application like Evernote instead of a bookmark manager. I used a bookmark manager as my primary source of keeping track of useful information on the interwebs for years. But after realizing that many of my bookmarks pointed to sites that were no longer there, and the inability to access information without the internet made me reconsider how I was storing things. Enter Evernote. Evernote is a notebook tool that is available as desktop, web and mobile, allowing me to get to my notes no matter where I am. Today I will talk about Evernote, its ups, downs and foibles, and how I use it.

  • Notebook Apps
    Planning,  Software

    Notebook Apps: Making Digital Planning Work

    Once I decided to make the jump to digital planning, I realized that it wasn't going to be enough to use the calendar, task and note apps. My planning is truly planning, and I needed a medium to do that. Today I'll talk about what I looked for, which apps I considered, and what I ultimately decided on and why.

  • cloud storage
    Software,  Tools

    Cloud Storage: Files in the 21st Century

    If you find yourself emailing a file or putting something on a thumb drive, please stop and come into the 21st century. Due to the nature of my career choice, I move between multiple computers every day. Sometimes I need to get things off of one computer or another, and I am certainly not going to drive out to a client site just to retrieve a timesheet. That's where cloud file storage comes into play.

  • Optimize Remember The Milk With Smart Lists
    Software

    Optimize Remember The Milk With Smart Lists

    Task lists are great, but what if you only want to see part of your task list at a time? Say, the tasks near where you are? Or the tasks that are due within the next week? Some systems would have you keep separate lists. But a feature within Remember The Milk called Smart Lists, provides it with no extra work. Today we will look at how to optimize Remember The Milk with Smart Lists.