Thursday 8 September 2016

Evernote: my Online Tickler File

I've not been on any courses or attended any conferences recently, but I thought I would share my experience with something I've been working on for several months now: my online Tickler File, courtesy of Evernote.

If you've not come across the term before, a Tickler File is just one of the many methods of being organised in the office. A typical system has a folder for each month, then a folder for each day, so 43 folders in all. Scheduled events for the current month are slotted into their daily folders. Each day you tackle the events in the folder, then refile into when they're next due. So January 1st, you do the tasks, and shift the '1' folder to February, adding any daily tasks due then to that folder once they're completed. Have I confused you? There are better descriptions elsewhere, just look.

Apparently there's lots of software available to do this, but a lot is proprietary, or costs, or works on a calendar. I think it's LifeHack or WikiHow that suggested Evernote, and I gave it a go. Basic Evernote is free (Evernote Premium costs), and the most important factor for me to choose it over a physical file cabinet is that it is immediately accessible when I sit down at my desk. I keep nearly all my tabs on my browser on all the time, and Evernote has duly been added.

Evernote has 'notebooks' and 'notes' rather than folders and files, but they amount to the same thing. What I've done is create a notebook for each month, then within these create a new note for each day. Repeated tasks are done that day, then cut and pasted to the next day they're due, while non-repeated tasks are just added to the relevant date then removed once completed.

June 1st, after tasks have been completed and next year's added.

I started in May, so I'm quite impressed that I've kept it going this long. It's a bit trickier when I'm away for any length of time because weekly tasks don't get done, and it's bad enough being behind in the tasks, but it's definitely made worse by seeing how far back I have to go on Evernote to catch up. It's also in some ways a little demotivating to delete something rather than satisfyingly crossing it through, and you can't use it as a record of what you've done that year, unless you keep done tasks somewhere else, and I think for me that just adds an unnecessary layer of admin on an already insane workload.

Where it's been useful though is for the infrequent but regular tasks I have to do - annual statistics can be gathered together in the days before the annual report is compiled, book order chases are done often enough to keep on top of them, but not so often that the vendors get annoyed, and you can see in advance what are going to be task-filled days and work around them when necessary. The fact that it isn't hard copy was the absolute deal-sealer for me - I need it handy but not in the way, and my desk is far too cluttered with stuff to want a diary or something that needs referring to regularly without it ending up on top of a pile of unpaid invoices.

My desk, looking a bit less cluttered than usual, but still woefully cluttered.

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