The Elusive Holy Grail that remains forever elusive

Personal Technology ,  Jeremy Wagstaff   |  Mon, 11/02/2009 9:40 AM  |  Sci-Tech

A friend asked me the other day whether I had found the perfect system for getting my stuff organized, and I had to confess that I hadn’t.

It’s that Holy Grail that remains forever elusive.

But that shouldn’t stop us trying.

Maybe like the Holy Grail, it’s about the journey more than the arriving.

(I must confess my knowledge about the Holy Grail is entirely sourced from Monty Python, so I might be wrong here.)

Anyway, there are lots of different ways to organize all the stuff in your life, and I don’t think any of them are going to suit each person.

My wife, for example, still uses a little tool called Stick that I introduced to her years ago.

It’s a small program that sits atop your Windows screen and lets you add little notes to yourself.

I’ve moved on to other things, but I can never suppress a pang of jealousy that she stuck with Stick and it still works well for her.

Meanwhile, I struggle with dozens of different programs, scripts, bookmarks, automated email systems that I actually need a flowchart to remind me how my organizing system is organized.

This can’t be good.

So, here’s an update on my tips but with the provisos that:

a) this might not work for you
b) My compulsion is less towards getting organized than experimenting with systems to get me organized. There’s a difference.

OK. The toolbox:

A scanner. I stick with Fujitsu’s Scansnap, because it romps through pages like there’s no tomorrow. And, with the updated software, lets you tell it where you want to store the resulting scans.
Evernote software. I’ve mentioned this before: It’s free, so long as you don’t need much online storage.

You could do with more, but this is a start.

Evernote, as I’ve mentioned before, lets you store stuff in a freeform manner. In other words, you don’t need to think too hard about what label to give it, what folder to put
it in etc.

Evernote is good because you can back up — and access-your stuff
online easily, and because the software makes it very easy to tag and find stuff.

(It’s not perfect, and they’re working on a new version, which I’m afraid isn’t worth really using yet.)
Now, for Evernote to work properly, you need to be able to put stuff in there relatively painlessly.
The problem is that the stuff that comes in doesn’t come in as cleanly as you’d like.

There are receipts in your wallet.

Articles on webpages that are so cluttered and weirdly designed that isolating the article involves jujitsu.

Stuff that’s already on your computer in folders you don’t want to mess around with.

Twitter messages you’ve sent that you’d like to save for posterity.

Emails from your accountant you need to keep in a place in addition to your email folder.
You get the picture.

Actually Evernote does a pretty good job of all this, but you need to do a bit of customizing.
For example, you can set up your twitter account so that you can copy twitter messages you send or receive to your Evernote database from within twitter. (Also useful for sending messages to yourself if you’re a heavy twitter user.)

For more on this, check out this page: http://bit.ly/7Iz5w

If you’ve got a Scansnap scanner, then check out this page to set up your Scansnap software so it automatically sends all your scans to Evernote: http://bit.ly/1azZGA

This works well, and, in case you’re wondering, doesn’t mean you still can’t save your scans to specific folders, if that’s the kind of person you are. Evernote will make a copy anyway.

Saving webpages that contain a lot of advertising and clutter?

Fiddly, but try this trick. Create a bookmark that combines two services: Evernote’s own clipper and a service called Readability, which converts webpages into simple format that strips away all the nonsense and just leaves the bit you want to actually read. Instructions here: http://bit.ly/180E25 (from Lifehacker, a great website for tips.)

Want to send some emails directly to Evernote for safekeeping?

Set up a rule, or filter, depending on your email program, to forward those emails to your Evernote email address. (You’ll find this on your Evernote settings webpage after you’ve signed up and logged on.)

You’ll see the emails appearing in your Evernote notebook shortly thereafter.

Lastly, to incorporate stuff that’s already on your computer, use the import option (in the File menu) and select the folder(s) you want to include.

You can choose to import these folders once, or have Evernote monitor them and include new files when they appear.

(Evernote won’t delete or alter any of these files, unless you ask it to.)

Now, don’t get me wrong.

Evernote doesn’t cover all the bases.

It’s slow to load if you’ve got a lot of stuff in there. It doesn’t work well with contacts, because you can’t synchronize them with your cellphone.

And although you can organize stuff in notebooks, you can’t create subfolders, if that’s your thing.
But it’s maybe the easiest, and cheapest, way to organize large bodies of unwieldy information, whether it be a picture, an Acrobat file, or just some text you typed in or grabbed from the net.

That you can then access this stuff from wherever you happen to be is a bonus.

Me? I haven’t moved everything over yet, but that’s another story.

My wife, meanwhile, uses it for sharing research she’s collated for her clients.

But she still loves the Stick. And insisted I include a link in case you prefer the simple option. Here it is: http://bit.ly/QkK5Q

(c) 2009 Loose Wire Pte Ltd

This story cannot be reproduced without written permission from the writer. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. You can reach him via email at jeremy@loosewire.org

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