After the recent entries about my notebook “system” I received a comment from one of my former colleagues about using an electronic system instead of paper. I wrote back that I firmly believe in the paper system as I described it. I added that one of the virtues of the paper system is that it is socially acceptable to flip through a few pages of a notebook in a meeting, while it may be considered rude/unfocused to be flipping through apps on your iPad to accomplish the same thing.
Brian wrote back with an interesting flipside to that observation: that at his institution as more and more people have iPads (part of a commitment to sustainability) “we’re almost to the point that you’re “judged” more for having a paper notebook than you are for scrolling through your iPad.”
If you are at a similar place, or just prefer an electronic system, you can take pieces of Brian’s strategies and apply them to your liking. I think the key to any successful organizational system is that it works for you.
So, in the spirit of sharing, here are Brian’s ideas for electronic organization:
As for the high tech option: I use an app called “Evernote”. It’s a great app that lets you take notes either by typing or handwriting (using the complementing app called “Penultimate”). The nice features of this app that make me like it:
> It’s free; there are paid upgrades available, but, you can do basically everything you really need/want to do for free.
> There’s a desktop program you can download to your computer and have it sync with the notes; this makes them accessible from both devices automatically and helps with efficiency.
> You can “scan” documents to add to your notes.
> You can “tag” notes to help organize them easily; you can also create “notebooks” to also help you organize your notes.
> You can send/share/etc your notes with other people.
Those are the features I generally like. The WAY I use it is this:
> I create notes for each of my meetings; I have “running” notes for my recurring meetings. Meaning, my 1-1 meetings with my staff, I have a “1-1” note with the person’s name and I just add to it by drawing a line & adding the newest meeting’s notes to the top of that page (so the most current is the first thing I see). That way I don’t have to figure out which note I need to look up first.
> I take my notes from the meetings on that note and I use another cool feature of the program that allows you to actually create a checkbox for any items (i.e. “to-do” items). You can then “check” them when you’re done.
> This is one of the keys: the “tagging” feature. I can create as many tags as I want and I can attach as many tags to each note as I want. So, I create tags like: “Staff”, “1-1s”, “Student Life”, etc – each of those may apply to 1 meeting so I put all those on that note, making it easier to find later and have it be related to other notes.
> The key on this is creating the “To Do” tag – any note that I take that then contains one of those checkboxes gets tagged “To Do”. When I’m taking time to follow up on those items, I just pull up all the notes tagged “To Do” and make my way through the list. I then remove the “To Do” tag from the note when I’ve completed all the necessary tasks.
— beth triplett and Brian Gardner
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