Tag: organization

The importance of my calendar, and other tools 

Carl Setzer

Oh, trying to stay on top if the mania of my life. It’s not easy right now, nor has it been so in ages. Trying to get everything I want to do done is hard.

My friends and family know that I need to enter anything asked if me into my calendar. If that doesn’t happen, it’s likely to get lost in the blizzard that is my life. Generally I grab my phone and plug “whatever” into my calendar. And those tools have evolved.

Up until a few years ago, I was a hard core Franklin-Covey devote. My lovely leather planner went pretty much everywhere with me. Now, I’m pretty fully electronic, for good and for ill. I believe there’s value in interacting with paper. Stuff seems to get into my brain better that way. But the convenience of tech, using multiple devices to access and manage stuff, and the ability to have reminders pop up have become crucial.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a took called IQTell.  This was a solid blend, integrating my different streams of information, email, calendar, notes (including Evernote, one of my key organization tools), and tasks into a cohesive and thoughtful system. Sadly, they’ve announced that they’re discontinuing this guy. And so I’m, yet again, seeking a new system. Right know, everything is getting dumped into Evernote, which isn’t feeling too effective.

I’ll be writing about that over the next few days.

Paper vs Digital Notes and Vanishing Information

Carl Setzer

Today I was thinking today about the past. I worked on at project, in the mid-nineties, for Amazon. They were located in a single building in downtown Seattle, very close to Pike Place Market. Nothing to dramatic, just installed terminals in a new call center. I had fun. My main memory: a guy brought his Corgi to work every day. About once an hour, a ball would be thrown down the hall and the dog would tear after it. For me, that exemplified the kind of place I wanted to work.

Anyway, I was wondering what I could pull together from that. Who did I work with? For? Was I there for a week? A month?

All that info? Gone. Yeah, that was quite some time ago. But I’m a rather meticulous note-taker, so am a bit bothered by the information being simply gone.

Now, that was pre-digital anything, really. Ok, the world wide web was a thing (duh, Amazon), but I didn’t own a cellphone yet. There wasn’t a smartphone of any stripe (it would be several years before Handspring would launch the Treo). So, yeah…gone.

Much is made about the fragility of digital record keeping. But there’s fragility to paper, too. Sure, these notes may still exist in some box in my garage. But, most likely, they were tossed out, left somewhere, or… There’s no such thing as backing up paper “stuff”.

When I think about using tools like Evernote, Gmail and all the grand life in the Cloud, I’m struck by a key thing: syncing. My digital information is available cross-platform, cross-device, cross-everything. It’s easy to share (and, yeah, subpoena). Which, to me, sells digital over paper.

Now, I do have paper notes, and journals and notes and…I just need to remember to scan them in, just for a backup. Because, who knows, in twenty years, I might really be interested in where I was today.