In this week's episode, the ProductivityCast team discusses managing digital notebooks. With so much data flowing through your systems, taking and keeping track of our notes and reference information in our software of choice is critical to our personal productivity. How do you manage your digital notebooks?
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In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Show Notes | Managing Digital Notebooks
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Rocketbook Everlast notebooks
Evernote
Simplenote
Goodnotes
Google Keep
Google Chromebook
What are some good names for Evernote notebooks?
Bagua
Steven Covey’s four life areas (see Habit 7)
Raw Text Transcript | Managing Digital Notebooks
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24
I am Augusto Pinaud. Good morning.
Art Gelwicks 0:27
And I'm Art Gelwicks. Good morning.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:30
So welcome to the show, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners. So today what we're going to be doing on the cast is talking about managing digital notebooks. That seems to be a pain point for a lot of folks. And so we thought we would spend a little bit of time today in this episode talking about how people manage notebooks. And so we all actually come at this from very different perspectives, I want us each to kind of talk about our own ways in which we manage notebooks, and how that either helps or hurts us in our own productivity systems. And maybe some of the challenges that we do face as we as we move along in it. Let's start off with how each of us actually manage notebooks, what types of notebooks do we use, specifically in the digital world, but we had an episode on bullet journaling. And we talked about the physical notebook world. And so we know that in some way, shape or form, those are always going to blend into one another. So let's talk a little bit more about our our digital notebooks today.
Augusto Pinaud 1:32
Very cool girl.
One is how you organize them How'd you find the information, you know, when you have to pay for one, you have this for good or for bad, you know, you can move forward, you may stay information but but you carry on. Remember,
have the the reminder in front of you that you have this thing to think Digital Lifestyle and fantasies you can now put on your ridiculous women are information for the same amount of way. The problem is how you are going to find that information as much as search capability is amazing. These days, it is still a problem of remember, what is the information you put it there? Or what is the information. Dude, another one to lose out a bad note. That said there is
better tools or tools that work better for certain people than others. And now the question comes on, on what you want to do now for, for me in particular, the notebook for to work. I, for years, I made the handwriting even that my my handwriting is awful, I missed the ability to hand write on the screen. But I did not want it to carry all the digital stuff that I carry with me every day plus, carrying a couple of notes. Now that
now that Apple had a pro with the pencil, then it gives me the advantage that I can do good handwriting notes. Okay, even carry a couple of different notebooks for a couple of different purpose. But take good notes in the process and having a good place where I can find it.
Art Gelwicks 3:22
It's funny because it is probably one of the biggest problems I personally run into. Everybody I talked to run into one note, which is my tool of choice for digital notes is fantastic at creating multiple notebooks. The heck they have is that every time you create a notebook, it's a separate file. So you you can wind up with just a plethora of different files. Now, there's a lot of advantages to that. But there's also some disadvantages to and trying to keep all that stuff organized, can be really problematic. You wind up with notebooks all over the place, you wind up with him in one drive in one note online, you're on your local hard drives, and
it becomes a matter of given take a lot out of the normal reaction is okay, fine, I'll just put everything in 111 note notebook, Say that three times fast.
If you do that, you've introduced a whole new set of problems.
So there isn't really a good solution for it. Now let's throw it on top of it. My other favorite thing, which is my paper journals, because I love writing paper, you capture information, you're able to review it. But it's one of the reasons why people have gone to digital Digital's easier to recut recall, easier to search, it's lighter, for lack of a better term in many cases. And working together a concept like bullet journaling in to this mix really becomes a struggle for a lot of people because they're like, well, I want to do it on paper. But I want the benefit fits of digital, how do I get to that happy medium. So they try to do things like recreate a digital bullet
journal in something like one note, which is never a perfect fit, it's doable, but it's not a perfect fit. And I think that's the hang up of all of this is there is no perfect answer to this, there's a it becomes a work process that you have to have, there's no flip a switch, all the notes will work just fine if you follow this structure, and I have yet to find a tool that does not have that problem. If it's handling digital note taking.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:34
I can see your point and and as you know, I'm an Evernote certified consultant and i and i love Evernote. So you know I'm a I'm a big fan of the the the way in which Evernote manages information. And you know, I think of Evernote more as a knowledge management tool. But in so many ways, it is the note taking software of choice for myself whenever I go into into into meetings, except for the fact that having a company pewter in a meeting while talking to clients is still somewhat of a barrier for me, I don't I don't necessarily know if clients don't particularly like it, but I don't like it. I don't like having a computer between us. Whereas having a physical notebook that I could take notes into general generally, is something that I feel more comfortable with. So I've actually gone to using a notebook called the everlasting notebook made by the rocket book team. And now they have all kinds of different notebooks. But this every last series of notebooks comes in different sizes. And they allow me to take handwritten notes, and then push those notes into the Evernote platform as as handwritten notes, but they are then OCR by Evernote so that I can search them. And this is actually really helped synthesize my digital system. And and so let me let me take a step back, though and cover a little bit of how I perceive Hello view the importance of being able to manage data in notebooks. Right. So, so from a note taking perspective, we have the capturing process into a notebook, we have then the management of that data within notebooks. And then we have the ability to filter and search, you know, surface the information, hopefully more quickly than slowly when we're trying to find that information that we want. And so whether you use notebooks in the classical sense or tags to be able to filter, organize, and also create workflows.
Managing that that information? Well, it's actually really important for the long term, I know that search is great. I know that the ability, you know, the search functionality, and in many digital tools today is great. But that that can't be the the the the extent of your organizing, of notebooks, because once it gets large enough, then your your rate of being able to surface the information you want quickly, easily and accurately. diminishes, diminishes to a point of making you less productive, not just not just be frustrating. But then you come into this perspective of the same problem we have with paper filing, which is that you can spend an exorbitant amount of time looking for paper things. Do you do you agree or disagree?
We'll start with you. Augusto. Do you agree or disagree?
Can you can you not talk right now?
Art Gelwicks 8:44
He's muted right now.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:45
He's, he's muted. He can hear me.
Unknown Speaker 8:50
Oh, okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. So he wants to he wants to Oh, okay. All right. Okay, cool. So um, yeah, so art, go for it.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 9:00
disagree? What? What's your What are your thoughts?
Art Gelwicks 9:03
I wish it were that easy. I wish it were so easy to say, Yeah, I agree with it completely. Or no, I disagree with it completely.
