CPD23 – Things 8 & 9: Getting organised with Google Calendar & Evernote
As I’m so far behind (not necessarily the best way to start a blog post about getting organised…) with CPD23, I’m going to tackle things 8 & 9 in the same post. I like to think of myself as being quite highly organised. I’m generally more of a pen and paper person, an obsessive list-maker, always with a diary handy. However, in recent weeks I’ve had a lot more tasks to juggle at work and, with working on Chartership at home, it’s time I found some ways to get even more organised.
I did try to use Google Calendar. I use other Google services – iGoogle, Google Reader – so it was easy enough to set up but after that I couldn’t really see what extra it offers me at the moment. At work I use the calendar in Outlook extensively and have an academic year diary which essentially just duplicates everything I put in Outlook. I’ve used a diary for years to keep track of non-work and social stuff and this works just fine for me. I’ve tried in the past to use the calendar in my phone but always go back to the trusty diary – simple but effective.
I’m almost obsessive when it comes to writing lists. I’ve always got a to do list on the go – handwritten of course; there’s nothing more satisfying than crossing things off a list when they’re done – but as I am finding myself adding more items and with more stuff that’s ongoing I’m keen to try out some online tools for this. I initially registered for Evernote for this reason. I can access it on my phone so no need to worry about losing my little scraps of paper with lists written on. Having looked at Evernote again I realise I wasn’t really using it to its full potential. I really like the web page clipping feature – though I think that the annotation options offered by Diigo are possibly better – and being able to easily create notes from tweets is really useful, especially as I often favourite tweets if I want to look at a link later and then forget to go back to them. The main strength of Evernote is that it’s a great way to keep everything in one place – notes, lists, useful web pages – but perhaps it’s more of a jack of all trades, master of none. There are other tools out there that do many of the things that Evernote does better; they just don’t do them all. I’ll probably keep using it, but think I need to try a different tool for to do lists so can set deadlines and timescales. I’ll probably try Nirvana for this.
