Melvin, who serves as office manager for the Green Growing Things plant store, has been upgrading the boiler, so workers can take hot showers without going home. He got the idea from Google, and thought it sounded like a great way to manipulate employees into being indentured servants while thinking they’re just getting massive, awesome job benefits.
Today’s the big day! The plumber is replacing the boiler! He sent Melvin out for supplies at the hardware store. The plumber snapped pictures of the fitting to buy and texted them to Melvin. Melvin’s "office furnishings" reminder popped up a few days ago reminding him that we’ll need a new chair for the basement office once the boiler is in. And the shelving person sent notes about shelving bracket sizes to mount shelves above the boiler. And all this information is safe and secure in Melvin’s handy dandy little smartphone!
We Get Disorganized
Until he arrives at the store. There was...stuff...he needed to do, right? Wasn’t there a reminder? And something in an email? Or was that a photo album? Technology was supposed to make Melvin’s life easier. But it hasn’t.
Twenty years ago, you needed a 10'x10' cubicle to get this disorganized. Now, you can be completely disorganized with a device the size of a deck of playing cards. We call that "progress."
Your Notes Will Save You
Fortunately, you can pick up where they left off! Just use your Notes app to organize short-term information, outlines, and resources for whatever you’re working on at the moment. You can have one known place on your smartphone with everything related to a given project.
Use One Note Per Project
Create a notes folder called Current. Create one note for every project you’re working on. For example, if you’ve founded the People’s Liberation Front of Judea, you would create a note titled WORKING PLF. Put the word WORKING in all caps at the front of each note title. That way, when you search for PLF, you can distinguish the note with your working information from the note with the draft of the PLF Communal Egg-Sharing Manifesto. Don’t mix those up! If you do, the yolk’s on you. (God, I just love my sense of humor sometimes.)
Put Everything in the Note
Your working note is where you put the electronic equivalent of sticky notes related to the project that don’t go anywhere else. You walk past the local library and have an idea: the PLF can sneak in and liberate all the books on living a gluten-free lifestyle. So you just type that idea right into the note. Later, you can review your notes and can decide if it’s even possible to liberate a book from an open-access public lending library.
The purpose of your WORKING note is to be a catch-all for your thoughts. So when your sibling suggests that you can mount a hacking expedition to take over Wikipedia and liberate all the web pages into the public domain, you can type that in too.
Group Related Ideas
The Notes app supports bullet points and header fonts, so you can cut and past and group related ideas.
In this case, you group the library and Wikipedia and add a heading: Possible Liberation Initiatives. Then when you decide, predictably, that you might want to liberate the dresser that someone left on the curb with the sign that says "Take me," you can add that as a third bullet point.
Since notes are free-form, you can also capture issues the movement needs to grapple with. Perhaps an item saying,“early successes are good for morale, but are we setting our sights too low by only liberating things that are already free?”
Just think, if you didn’t have a place to collect all your ideas in one place, you might have forgotten to ask that question.
Collect All the Things in Your Note
Put everything about a project in its working note. You can type bullet lists by starting a line with a dash or an asterisk. Create an outline by indenting bullet lists.
Add tasks related to a project, and add a checkbox so you can check them off when they’re done.
Sketch ideas directly into the note when you’re brainstorming by tapping the little magic-marker icon.
You can even sketch ideas on a napkin (it’s always a napkin—why haven’t any of these genius inventors ever heard of a notebook?) and scan them. The circle-plus tool gives a menu to insert photos, and scan documents, as described in episode 470: How Scanning Apps can Organize Your Life.
My Working Notes on Video Production
I’m creating productivity tools videos for my Get-it-Done Groups. My WORKING Tools videos note has notes on all the possible tools, grouped by category: procrastination tools, calendar tools, task-list tools, and so on. When brainstorming a lesson, I unironically grab a napkin, sketch out a storyboard, and scan the storyboard straight into the note. When it’s time to choose a tool and produce the video, everything I need is in a single note.
Synchronize the Name with Your Other Working Folders
If you use a project folder to organize files on your desktop—as described in episode 346: How a Short Term Memory Folder Can Help Your Workflow—give your WORKING note the same name as that project’s folder on your desktop. That way you know that every folder named PLF refers to the People’s Liberation Front, and everywhere you deal with the People’s Liberation Front, it will be called PLF.
Next time someone gives you a great idea, you can jot it right down, look them straight in the eye, and say, "Noted."
Some Projects Are Too Awesome for Just One Note
If your project outgrows a single note, create a notes folder called WORKING PLF. Then inside that folder, you can could create one note called Liberation Ideas and another called Egg-sharing Manifesto.
I prefer one note per project. It’s easier to scroll through and see everything. Separate notes means more time fiddling with navigation.
When You Move Stuff, Say Where You Moved It
Sometimes you’ll migrate a project elsewhere. I was outlining a presentation in my WORKING note. When it was time to create the presentation in Keynote, I moved the outline from notes into Keynote. In the note, I typed "(Moved to Keynote)." The next time scanning the note, it’s a reminder of where the most current version lives.
Plumbing the Depths
Melvin has the answer: Deftly create a note entitled WORKING Boiler Replacement, and then next time the plumber sends pictures of fittings, in they go. The shopping list of office chairs to check out? Those become a list of checkboxes. And the notes about shelving bracket sizes are freeform text. At the hardware store, he just pulls up the note, scrolls through it, and all the information related to the boiler trip is at his fingertips.
Use your smartphone notes program for keeping everything about a project in one place: a note with pictures, checklists, freeform information, and ideas. Name your notes consistently, and expand into a folder of notes if needed. When you move them to your desktop, put a reminder in your smartphone telling you where you moved them. Next time someone gives you a great idea, you can jot it right down, look them straight in the eye, and say, "Noted."
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you have projects that are stalled or taking too long, check out my “Get-it-Done Groups” accountability groups. Learn more at http://SteverRobbins.com.
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