The ever eternal battle for figuring out the right productivity and organization system has continued through 2016 and 2017…and I think I’ve finally figured out based on the nature of the information/work to be captured and accessed, certain tools/apps actually do a better job.
I found myself using a system comprising of both electronic (Evernote, Atlassian Jira and Confluence) and analog (Moleskine notebook) and that itself differed between work and home and if what I was working on was a solo or team endeavour.
For work on a personal front, I found Evernote was still my steady go-to app, with the ability to search for notes and have it act as a “staging/editing” spot for snippets of text that would find its way into an email or document. On the team front, Atlassian Jira’s Kanban board feature and Confluence’s wiki structure helped the team understand who was working on what, and where to store team processes. I had bought a Moleskine Professional Notebook but it’s been largely unused.
For everything else outside work, it’s mostly analog, with a small Moleskine blank paged notebook to help me organize many of my crafting ideas/prototyping and general to-do lists. Evernote pops up from time to time as I use the Clipper browser extension for online recipes and other creative ideas to catalog.
Overall, I’m still a fan of analog systems, but it feels like it depends on the nature of the information/work to be captured (i.e. facts and processes vs. ideas and creative visualizations), there is no one right app or site that can do the job for everything I need, and that’s not a bad thing…
