Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

i need an organizer to organize my organizers

I am not sure the proliferation of software geared toward helping you organize yourself is all that good of thing. Too many choices. Or maybe not enough choices to fit the needs? I would love to have just one program that is able to do everything I need it to do.

I thought, maybe, I had found it with OneNote. Endless little notebooks, tagging, the ability to really easily make tables, and all sorts of stuff. I admit, evil though Microsoft may be, I gotta have my OneNote.

Except.

I also have to have my Evernote. It’s far easier to find things in it, with the tagging system and there are fewer clicks when going through all the stuff I’ve gathered because it’s all, truly, in one long note (per notebook). No little tabs or anything. For research – or, really, for compiling the information that I am using for research, that I can access from anywhere, I find Evernote invaluable. Also, it is free.

However.

I feel incomplete when I don’t have the Firefox plugin, Scrapbook. It’s an oldie(ish) but goodie (and old-shoe familiar for me), and simply excellent, in my view, for just clicking quickly, annotating and storing masses of information gathered from various places online. Either the whole page or just a snippet. (There are online services good for that too, but I need my information available offline.)

To be fair, the other two programs do much the same, although I have not been able to get a OneNote clipper to work in Firefox.Evernote does, with no problem. But I can’t really organize on the fly (with Evernote OR OneNote), which I need to do, being far too scatterbrained to go back and do it later, which is where I value Scrapbook.

But.

Scrapbook doesn’t have an online backing up of stuff server (so far as I know). With Evernote, everything I save offline is also saved online when it next syncs with the server. I’ve had soooo many computer crashes over the years that this is a necessity for me, because I’ve just lost too much work.

Like I’ve, apparently, lost a lot of the history research I had been doing and storing in Scrapbook. I thought I had backed up these items to my online storage server (yet another tendril of my organizational web), but when I finally remembered that  and went to check earlier today – well, either I somehow erased the stuff, or I didn’t actually put the items in this particular online storage in the first place,. In which case… where the heck DID I put them?

So, you see.

I need an organizer to organize my organizers so I can keep track of just what I am organizing where. And why.

Sigh.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:01 pm and is filed under organizing me, random, stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Comments, Comment or Ping

  1. Jeff Janer

    6:18 am on January 28th, 2010 1

    Have you looked at Springpad (http://springpadit.com)? It’s a free mobile and web-based personal organizer that makes it easy to save and share just about anything you come across that you want to get to later. We also have more than 70 pre-formatted apps and lists that help you use the content and data you’ve captured. And, you can also create and customize your own notebooks.

    (disclosure: I’m a Springpad co-founder)

  2. Nanette

    10:52 am on January 28th, 2010 2

    Hi Jeff,

    Thanks for the tip! And congrats on putting out such a useful and needed product. :) And it’s free! Yay!

    I’ve signed up and as I go through my days and research, I’ll go ahead and test drive it. And report back. Just from looking around it, though, it does look like a good and even fun tool. I’m not positive it would be best for my research needs (it doesn’t appear to “spring” photos, plus I need offline access) but as I’ve used it for a total of maybe 15 minutes, I’ll make no judgments on that yet. Who knows what apps you have for what?

    Anyway, I’ll try to report back next week.

  3. Jeff Janer

    11:00 am on January 28th, 2010 3

    Thanks for taking a look Nanette; we really appreciate input and feedback.

    BTW, our bookmarklet does enable you to spring photos (just highlight the photo); and you can also add video files and links.

    We’re working on offline access – starting with our iPhone app that will be submitted for approval in the next couple of weeks.

  4. Nanette

    9:33 am on January 29th, 2010 4

    Jeff, excellent news on the ability to clip photos and other media! Thanks for letting me know or I might have given up prematurely.

    Anyway, I’ll go ahead and use it pretty much exclusively for a week or so, and do a write up about it. And make a wish list!

    We’re working on offline access – starting with our iPhone app that will be submitted for approval in the next couple of weeks.

    Grrrr. And of what use is that to us Blackberry users, I ask you? ;)

    I was able to access the site and my page on the mobile though, with one of the full screen browsers, so I’ll play around with that too.

    Thanks much!

  5. Jeff Janer

    9:37 am on January 29th, 2010 5

    Great Nanette; look forward to your thoughts; and fear not – BB and Android apps are on the roadmap as well (scheduled before the desktop client).

  1. Serenity - an expedition - springpad – an organizer for my organizers? | Serenity… an expedition - Jan 29th, 2010

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