Thursday, October 15, 2009

Productivity!

As I have stated before I use Evernote to keep all the bits of information in my life organized. I am also trying to get a good GTD habit going. Both of these attempts to improve my productivity have had fits and starts while they work their way into my thoughts and routine. Along the way I have become increasingly aware of the roadblocks to getting tasks that get log jammed.

One big goal I had was to consistently scan the papers on my desk that fit into the Someday / Maybe and Reference categories into PDF and have them go into Evernote and then recycle the paper. I did this well for a couple of weeks at the beginning of the summer but my method of getting this task accomplished was a bit kludgy. In short, I would organize my papers, walk to the scanner, scan the each document to my e-mail account and then forward a number of separate e-mails to my Evernote account. None of these tasks are difficult, but they are tedious and I could always find other things better to do with my limited time in the office.

Today I had a break through in improving this process. Our Copier/Scanner lets us program destinations (e-mail addresses) into the LCD panel. I programmed in my Evernote address into the scanner and can now scan papers directly to my Evernote account, no more right click forward x50 in Outlook. I know on the surface this sounds like a very obvious and simple solution that I should have found long ago. But as I have found many times, solutions to road blocks in our productivity stream aren't always apparent to us right away. And when implemented these simple solutions pay off exponentially.

Friday, September 25, 2009

Meet up with Gary Vaynerchuk after the Wine Conference tomorrow

Post Wine Conferance meet up with Gary VaynerchukNow with more #crushit
Host:
HoustonTTT
Type:
Party - Mixer
Network:
Global
Start Time:
Saturday, September 26, 2009 at 9:15pm
End Time:
Sunday, September 27, 2009 at 12:00am
Location:
13 Celsius
Street:
3000 Caroline
City/Town:
Houston, TX
View Map
Google
MapQuest
Microsoft
Yahoo
Phone:
2813828640
Email:
bbrooks@sprt.com

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

How I use Evernote

Someone asked me today how I personally use Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/). A reply of Facebook didn't give me enough room to adequately reply, hence this blog post.

I have lots of information coming at me in various forms, e-mail, paper, voice mail, pictures of whiteboards, screenshots, etc. In the past I have had haphazard ways of organizing this info, I had some notes in Outlook, some PDFs in this folder here and there, and e-mails sorted in Outlook folder tree hell.

The other challenge is all the different types of computers and mobile devices I interact with on a daily basis made my former method of data organization difficult. I have my desktop, any number of servers, clients PCs, my iPhone. If a PDF was stored on my server at work, in Outlook, or wherever it could be fairly cumbersome if not impossible to get to the data I needed.

My solution to these two problems for the last year has been Evernote. Evernote is a cloud based information storage service. I can painlessly store bits of websites, e-mails, pictures, and document files of all types and store them in a central location that is accessible from a desktop client (OS X and Windows), from the Web, and my iPhone. Not only can I access Evernote from all the places I need to I can also get information into Evernote in many effortless ways. Evernote has a bookmarklet that allows me to add webpages or portions of a webpage to Evernote with a single click in the browser. I can forward any e-mail I receive to a private Evernote address and the e-mail and all attachments will be caputred to my Evernote account. From my iPhone and Evernote.app I can capture text, audio, and pictures and send them to my Evernote account right from my phone.

Additionally, for a few dollars a month you can get a Pro account which adds more features. Chief among those is the ability to search not only your notes for text but also to search any attachements to those notes (.doc, .pdf, .jpg, gif) files for text. Translation, I can find my information fast even if I just know a portion of what I am looking for.

That in short is how I utilize Evernote. I use it more and more each day. Give it a whirl and see if can make your digital life a bit more organized.

-b

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

TTT for August 2009

Again, for those non-facebookers:


TTT for August 2009
Host:
HoustonTTT
Type:
Party -
Network:
Global
Date:
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Time:
6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location:
Colina's
Street:
3835 Richmond Ave
City/Town:
Houston, TX
View Map
Google
MapQuest
Microsoft
Yahoo

Sunday, July 26, 2009

TTT For August 2009

FFF for August 2009

Host:
Type:

Network:
Global
Date:
Friday, August 14, 2009
Time:
6:30pm - 9:30pm
Location:
Khun Kay Thai Cafe
Street:
1209 Montrose Boulevard
City/Town:
Houston, TX

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

My current reading list

Here are the books I'm currently reading through.


Re-reading:

Friday, May 29, 2009