First, let me say thank you to everyone who asked questions. There were 28 questions and I&#;ve tried to answer them all below, and it has made for an exceptionally long Going Paperless post this week, one that exceeds 6,000 words! But the questions were great ones and I hope I was able to answer them all adequately.
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A few notes before I get to the questions and answers:
I think that&#;s about it for housekeeping. Thank you again for the questions. Also, many commenters took the time to say nice things about my posts. Thank you for that, too. It is always heartening to hear. Now, onto the questions and answers.
Since Evernote it my paperless filing cabinet, on those rare instances I do get business cards, that&#;s where they go. Evernote makes an app called Evernote Hello, which is very useful for this. It will allow you to take photos from business cards and capture the data discretely. It can also do things like capture a history of interactions with people you meet over time. I don&#;t use the app much because I don&#;t get a lot of business cards these days, but I have seen Hello in action and if you handle a lot of business cards, you should check it out.
I do carry business cards and give them out when requested. I do this for my freelance writing work only, however. At my day job, I ran out of business cards and never reordered because I rarely needed them. Meeting with editors, agents and other writers, it is useful to have them and give them out.
Carrying around paper business cards may sound counter to the Going Paperless lifestyle. But I&#;ve often said that going paperless isn&#;t an all-or-nothing venture. You have to expect people will still give you paper, so paper will come into your system and you need to be prepared to deal with that. Similarly, there are social conventions which aren&#;t going to change just because I go paperless. So I carry business cards, but, depending on who I am interacting with, I sometimes ask if I can my contact information instead of handing out a card.
With respect to receipts, my approach is pretty simple and can be summarized approximately as follows:
If the receipt doesn&#;t meet any of those conditions, I throw it out as soon as possible because I&#;ve found that they seem to grow and multiply like moss collecting on a stone.
If I do keep them in Evernote, they all go into my &#;Filing Cabinet&#; notebook, with a tag called &#;receipt&#; if they are not related to writing; if they are related to my writing they go into a &#;Business&#; notebook also with a tag called &#;receipt&#;. As is my practice for all scanned documents, I alter the create date of the note in which the receipt is scanned to match the date on the receipt. This makes it easy to find them using the advanced date search features in Evernote.
I think what you mean to ask is what documents are only valid in their original, paper form, because pretty much any document can be scanned. But not all scanned documents may be accepted by various official outlets. As to which are and which aren&#;t, I can&#;t say. What I can tell you is what I do and my own rule of thumb:
That said, I scan virtually everything and in practice, when I need to present a document, I will offer the electronic version first. If the official with whom I am interacting says they need the original, fine, I&#;ll hand over the paper version. In two years, I can&#;t think of a single instance that this has happened.
Your best best, of course, is to consult with your accountant and lawyer to see what you absolutely must keep in paper, and what is okay to keep electronically.
Not long ago, I wrote a post on &#;My Paperless Cloud&#; in which I showed where I stored documents online. What that post did not cover was what I did with documents that I stored locally. The answer, for the most part, is that they go into a single folder on my iMac: Documents. I tend to sort folders like this by Last Modified Date, so that the most recently modified files show up at the top. This makes it easy to find stuff I&#;ve worked on recently.
The reason I can do this is because these days, I have very few documents outside my day job that I don&#;t keep in the cloud somewhere. When I need to create a spreadsheet for something, I prefer Google Spreadsheet over Excel. When I need to make a presentation, I&#;ll use Google Presentation over PowerPoint. so those files ultimately end up getting stored in the cloud. It makes it easy to share with people. I can simply share a link to the documents, as opposed to emailing a copy and then worrying about people making edits to multiple versions.
Probably 98% of my documents are stored in a service somewhere on this diagram:
For the remaining 2% or so, tossing them all into a Documents folder makes sense to me.
I try not to retain multiple digital copies of a document once I&#;ve scanned it into Evernote. On the other hand, I don&#;t go out of my way to delete them. When I scan a document, a PDF goes into a Photos folder on my iMac automatically. I think this is a default setting on the scanner software. Of course, the document is scanned directly to Evernote and that is where I look for it when I need it. Every now and then, I&#;ll purge all of those PDF files that also get created in my Photos folder, but I don&#;t lose sleep over it. On my local machine (outside of Evernote and the cloud) I the few documents I have locally all go into my Documents folder, which I sort by Last Modified Date so that the stuff I&#;ve changed most recently shows up at the top.
Back when I was writing academic research papers (circa -) I wasn&#;t paperless. Just the opposite. So I&#;ve never had to organize notes for an academic research paper using tools like Evernote. That said, I am a writer, I write both fiction and nonfiction, and I have had the opportunity to organize notes for both.
When organizing notes for research, my main goal is to keep it simple. I want to make it as easy as possible to find what I am looking for without adding a whole lot of overhead to the process.
Depending on the size of the project, I&#;ll use either a single note or a notebook. If the latter, the notebook usually gets tossed into my &#;Special Projects&#; notebook stack. If the former, the note probably goes into my &#;Inbox&#; notebook until I am done with it.
In either case, I create a shortcut to either the note or notebook so I can access it easily and don&#;t have to spend time hunting it down. Creating a shortcut probably saves me more time than any other organizational action I can take. I could tag the notes and add other meta data, but in truth, I am only every dealing with a few dozen notes at the most for my research and if they are all in one notebook that I can access from the shortcut bar, I don&#;t need to worry about tagging them.
If I was writing an academic paper and it was more elaborate, one thing I might use tags for would be to mark the quality of the source document. For instance, a &#;primary&#; tag for documents that represent a primary source (another academic paper of original research); and a &#;secondary&#; tag for documents that reference primary sources but are not primary sources themselves (e.g. a Wikipedia article that I&#;ve clipped).
But again, I like to keep things simple, so I&#;d only take this additional step if it made sense and saved me time in the long run.
The &#;best way&#; to organize is whatever works best for you. Everyone is different in this respect. That said, I have two suggestions that might make organizing and finding things easier. This goes for bills as well as anything else.
These two actions: make each note discrete and change the create date of a note with a scanned document to match the date on the document, are quick, easy, and make it easy to organize and find what I am looking for.
First, let me confess that I suck at GTD methodology. There is too much overhead for me. I&#;ve tried it in Evernote and I&#;ve tried it outside Evernote and I am one of those rare few who just can&#;t make it work. So I don&#;t use tags for GTD at all.
That said, I do use tags and I&#;ve written extensively about how I use them, in particular here and here. So let me just touch on three ways I use tags in this post and allow those other posts to go into detail.
I find that tagging can get out of hand quickly. Tags grow like weeds. Then, too, people tend not to plan out a taxonomy before tagging. You get some notes tagged &#;receipt&#; and others tagged &#;receipts&#; and searching &#;receipts&#; does NOT bring up notes tagged &#;receipt.&#; So again, I like to keep it simple, avoid tags where I can, and use them where they will actually save me time, like in the three examples I&#;ve given above.
I use Flickr as the central &#;authoritative&#; repository for all of my digital photos. In other words, all of my photos ultimately go up on Flickr, and when I need to search for a photo, that&#;s where I look.
Behaviorally, Flickr isn&#;t always the first place a photo goes. Sometimes, I&#;m snapping a picture of my kids and send that photo to Facebook, for example. One of my pet peeve&#;s is having to do the same thing twice. Since I&#;ve already uploaded a photo to Facebook, I don&#;t want to take the time to upload it again to another service, like Flickr. Fortunately, I don&#;t have to.
I have a series of IFTTT (If This Than That) recipes that do this for me:
These recipes save me a ton of time, while at the same time, work to ensure that all of my photos get into Flickr, no matter where they start.
Beyond that, I have ways of organizing the photos once they are in Flickr to make it easier to find what I am looking for, but I&#;ll save that for a separate Going Paperless post, as this one is already long enough.
As I said above, I use Flickr to centralize all of my photos. Each photo on Flickr has a download page that can provide the photo in a variety of sizes. Take for example, this photo I took:
Note that I have a ton of sizes to choose from. You can click on a size, then copy the photo and paste it into Evernote. Beyond that, there may be tools that you can download to your to change the size, but I tend to do all this work on Flickr.
I have no experience with audio transcription, but it sounds like what you are looking for is software that would transcribe your audio notes into text. You would then store both the text and the audio file in a single note in Evernote. Search would search the text, but you&#;d still have the audio file as your original source material.
As I said, I have no experience with audio transcription software, but there may be others reading the post who could jump in and help.
In addition to the meeting minutes, I have IFTTT recipes that do the following with respect to Evernote:
I don&#;t work with Microsoft documents nearly as much as I used to. Of course, in my day job I have to, but there, we collaborate using Microsoft SharePoint, which makes it relatively easy for everyone involved to work off a single copy of the document without having to copies here and there.
In the publishing world, more and more I am using Google Docs instead of Microsoft. I&#;ve worked with several editors who also use Google Docs, which makes collaboration&#;even real-time collaboration&#;so much easier. There are, however, still editors who use Microsoft Word. When I turn in a manuscript, they turn on the Track Changes feature and then mark up the document and send it back to me. In these instances, I have a process I&#;ve worked out that centers around Scrivener and Word, the tools I use for my final drafts and generating manuscripts. I&#;ve written about this process in great detail, if you are interested in learning more.
I have been moving toward a more context-based reminder system over time. This system spreads my reminders over all kinds of devices and services, but always in the context of what I am doing. Let me give some examples:
For basic to-do lists, I use Wunderlist, which can send me reminders when certain to-do items are coming due.
For events, meetings, travel, etc., I use Google Calendar. Since I&#;ve gotten my iPhone 5, I often get things onto my calendar by asking Siri to put it there for me, which simplifies things.
And speaking of Siri, I&#;ve found that I&#;ve used Siri to remind me of things based on time or proximity. For instance, I&#;ll say, &#;Remind me to mail the contract when I get to work tomorrow.&#; When I get to my office, Siri will remind me.
I use Evernote reminders for more context-based things. For instance, when I sign a contract for a story, I sell certain rights for a certain period of time. I&#;ll scan the contract into Evernote, and then create reminders for when the various rights revert back to me.
Another example: I&#;ll take a photo of the service sticker in my car and send that to Evernote. I&#;ll add a reminder to the note to remind me a week before my next service is due.
In , I tend to use Boomerang to remind me of things and keep my inbox clean. If I get a message that says I need to respond by August 31, I&#;ll &#;boomerang&#; the message so that it disappears from my inbox and reappears a few days before August 31.
All of this is to say that I find it increasingly easy to use reminders in context, whatever that context may be.
First, let me break my paperless reading into two categories and deal with each separately, as they are different processes: (1) &#;Online&#; reading, or the stuff I&#;d typically read in my browser; (2) Kindle reading.
1. Online Reading
I have a fairly straight-forward process for my online reading workflow. I typically read RSS feeds via Feedly, but will occasionally come across articles from other sources like Facebook or Twitter.
When I am reading online, I&#;ll look at an article in question and decide whether or not I want to read it now. If I do, I&#;ll read the article and then decide whether or not to clip it to Evernote. If I don&#;t read the article right away, I&#;ll clip it to Evernote using Evernote Clearly. I have clearly set up to send my articles to my Inbox with a &#;to-read&#; tag.
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When I find some time on my hands, I&#;ll pull up my &#;To-Read&#; saved search which look for all notes in my Inbox notebook tagged &#;To-Read&#;:
I will read one or more articles. After I finish each article, I remove the &#;to-read&#; to so that it no longer shows up in my search. Sometimes, I also refile the article to a more appropriate notebook, like a research or reference notebook.
2. Kindle Reading
If I am reading on my Kindle, I highlight and make annotations frequently, but these rarely go into Evernote. I am a big believer in having notes in the context of where they belong. If I am making notes and annotations in a book, I want those notes and annotations with the book, because that&#;s where I&#;ll look for them.
That said, Michael Hyatt has a great article for getting your Kindle note and highlights into Evernote, if you are interested in doing so.
I have no experience in manually moving local folders from one computer to another without syncing. You&#;d probably have to go to Evernote support for that. That said, what I tend to do in these situations is the following:
If I know I am going to be out of town and there may be a chance I&#;ll need a document in a local notebook, I&#;ll copy the note from a local notebook to an online (sync&#;d) notebook, and then tag it with something like &#;temp&#; or &#;remove later.&#; Yes, I am copying a note or notes that may contain more sensitive information to an online notebook, but I am not copying all the notes, just those that I think I might need. Then, too, when I return from my trip, I can search for any notes that I&#;ve tagged &#;temp&#; or &#;remove later&#; and delete them from my online notebooks.
Of course, a person&#;s willingness to do this varies with their comfort level with online security. I have no problem doing it, but others might.
And Tony asks a similar question:
First, let me say that I don&#;t lose sleep over this. There are three reasons for this:
Let me touch on the last two items. You can always export your notes from Evernote. I have written about this in more detail on my post on &#;Securing Your Digital Filing Cabinet&#; last year. When you export notes, you can export them to an EXEN format, which is essentially XLM with some additional meta-data and the ability to support attachments.
Recently, Evernote published a post with the details of this open format. The post describes how you can use the export files and gives the exact specification for how data is stored in the export files.
I am big on backups. I use CrashPlan for backing up my computers at home and it is great because I don&#;t have to think about it. I just backup up the machines and lets me know when it has trouble backing up a machine for some reason. I use VaultPress to back up this website, and I love it too, because it is just as automated. I have had to restore data from both CrashPlan and VaultPress and it has been easy to do each time.
As part of my normal backup process, I export my Evernote data to the EXEN format once each month. I compress the file and put it in a place where my CrashPlan backups will find it so that it gets backed up along with everything else.
Now, in the unlikely event Evernote were to go away, here is what I would do in the short term:
I think this is a very unlikely scenario, but I protect myself against it by having good backups. Today, my monthly export of Evernote data has been automated thanks to some AppleScripts I&#;ve written to do the work for me.
Without exporting your archive notes to an EXEN file and removing them from Evernote, I think that, for simplicity, what you are doing is probably your best bet.
If you want to archive your &#;Archived&#; notes, you would search for all notes that are tagged &#;archive&#;, select them all then export the notes to an EXEN file. Once you&#;ve done that, you can remove the notes from Evernote. If you needed to import them back in, you can use Evernote&#;s import function to import the EXEN file you exported. This will import all your notes to a single &#;Import&#; notebook, after which you could begin moving notes to their final destination notebooks.
On the desktop, the Mac version of Evernote builds in a quick note keyboard command into the OS menu bar. Press CMD-CTRL-N and the quick note window pops up for you to start making your note. You don&#;t even have to have Evernote open:
In iOS, I have found that a little app called Drafts is about the fastest way to create notes in Evernote. It starts up quickly, has a very low overhead and allows you to start typing your notes almost instantly.
Of course, you can also jot notes down in a notebook with a pen and paper and scan the pages in later. Evernote and Moleskine have teamed up to make a notebook for just this purpose.
Here is how I think of things: is for communication; Evernote is for reference.
I try to keep my inbox as close to zero as I can manage. If I need to keep an for communication purposes, I&#;ll archive in Gmail. If I feel like I need to keep an for reference purposes (maybe it&#;s a receipt, or a travel itinerary), I&#;ll send it to Evernote and delete the original .
When I go looking for something, I tend to think: am I looking for a communication or reference material? If the former, I&#;ll search Gmail first; if the latter, I&#;ll search Evernote first.
I am a big believer in one thing per note. The reason is that each note carries its own set of meta-data that is extremely useful in searches. If had one note for all of my meetings, it would take longer to find the notes for the meeting on August 10th, because first I&#;d have to find the note with the meeting notes, then I&#;d have to search within the note for August 10. Because I keep one note per meeting, all I need to do is search for meeting notes on August 10 in Evernote and the note I&#;m looking for comes up instantly.
So, bottom line, I create a separate note for each meeting. And when in doubt, I create a separate note for each &#;thing&#; I am capturing.
I&#;ve written about how I use Evernote versus Google Drive in my post on My Paperless Cloud, which you might want to check out if you haven&#;t already done so. Off the top of my head, I&#;d say things could be divided as follows:
I use the Bamboo Solo Stylus. It is the only stylus I&#;ve ever tried and I&#;ve been very happy with it. It came with a soft tip and that is also what I use.
I have run into that problem as well. I have setup Penultimate to write-handed wrist position closest to how I actually write:
But as you suggest, it doesn&#;t always work. My solution: I&#;ve learned to write on my iPad without touching my wrist to the screen. &#;
I think you are on the right track. The trick is convincing your boss that the tablets would result in a cost savings, which I imagine they would over the time which the tablet is depreciated. The idea is that you not only save the cost of the paper, but you are saving labor costs, which are far more expensive.
I&#;m afraid I have no experience whatsoever with audio recording and podcasting and wouldn&#;t even know where to begin with that. I&#;ve recorded audio notes into Evernote directly once or twice, and each time, the volume has sounded fine to me. But I did nothing other than press the record button. I adjusted no settings and made to changes to the defaults.
If you have a suggestion for a future Going Paperless post, let know me. Send it to me at feedback [at] jamietoddrubin.com. As always, this post and all of my Going Paperless posts is also available on Pinterest.
Last week&#;s post: 4 Ways I Use Evernote in My Freelance Writing.
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Imagine we&#;re in the year (it seems like it wasn&#;t that long ago, right?), walking into an office filled with employees. If you look around, you&#;d probably spot stacks of paperwork scattered around desks, clunky filing cabinets filled to the brim and a whole lot of running around to meet deadlines. Using SaaS expense management software would only come into play years later, but employees were likely dreaming about this future where their processes would be simpler, faster and way more efficient.
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