Taking Control: Things you may need to refer to sometime

When working your way through the stuff that clogs up your inbox each day it is really helpful to have a well organised and accessible place to put reference materials.

For physical stuff that place should be to hand - making the filing away really quick and easy.

For digital stuff it can be tricky depending on what devices you use and what the policies are whereever you work.

Whatever you use should fulfil the following, or as many of them as possible:

• Capable of taking information orginating in multiple formats (ie html for webpages, pdf's etc)
• Be instantly searchable across both titles and content for all parts of it
• Be usable on as many devices as is practical

There are an increasing number of services which allow for the above - my working one is Evernote. This is around since June 2008 and has been developed and improved constantly since then.

For me it allows me to take either a whole document or a clip of one (a copy and paste) really easily - and it preserves the formatting when you do so.

Sorting can be done on a number of levels - Notebooks, Places or tags and you also have a kickass search function.

Sync is instant - so as I drop information into it on my main computer it is copied into "the cloud" and then instantly available on my other computer, my laptop and my iPad.

It does not matter what you use - it just needs to do the job for you. What is your favorite tool for digital reference holding?

keith

Thanks to MrBill for the photo

Comments

[Ina]

For backing up all my data I use Zumo Drive.
I organise a lot of my own web pages through the use of bookmarks and use Bloglines for feeds as it is web based.

Its so hard to manage all the data and move it around but I find this works well for me.

BaseCamp and Google Docs are excellent for collaboration with others and I quite like Huddle also.

[keith bohanna]

Thanks Ina - all good tips and tools.

I use a number of services for backup and consider Evernote a little differently. Backup is for comfort and sensibility, Evernote is functional information retrieval.

keith