PinkElephant

In many discussions notebooks and tags are viewed as contradicting concepts. I want to share a view where within a workflow they are fluent, notes moving from a tag to a notebook back to a tagging-dominated perspective. My wife and I love to travel on our own. This means collecting many ideas about where to go, what to do, where to stay, what to eat etc. We have started to collect these snippets in a EN notebook “Travel ideas”, with some very basic tags. These are not related to the content, but only to find these nuggets in the database. All in one notebook, access through tags. When a travel plan gets more solid, I create a new notebook labeled with the destination and the year. There we collect everything related to this project. Here the notebook is the main criteria for holding things together. Tags move with the notes from “ideas” but are secondary, more notes join them (Tickets, Documents, Bookings and the like). Why a notebook ? Because it is easy to define a notebook with all its content as “offline”. When traveling it is always a good idea to carry everything along on the mobile devices. So we share this Notebook, and have things available wherever we are, no matter WiFi and roaming. While on the trip, more goes into the notebook, often scanned on the fly. Wherever there is a internet connection, it syncs to “home” and between the offline copies. Now we are back. Delete everything ? No, because it is there, contains memories, helps in sorting through the picture roll etc. But I do not want to have it hanging around as yet another notebook any more. Solution: I create a Tag named ZZZ_Destination_Year. ZZZ to move it to the end of the list (=tag archive), the rest is the selection criteria. Then I select all notes in the travel project notebook and assign them the new tag. This done, I move them all to a notebook “Travel Archive”, and delete the now obsolete project notebook. For us it works and took a lot of stress out of travel preparation and execution - because every information is always going to one place, nearly always available. Even when we are happy as it is, we are open to ideas to improve this further. The concept can of course be transferred to all processes that run through a planning-execution-followup-archive-cycle.

The planet is spinning, the wheels are grinding .... Compared to other ages, we live in the best of all worlds.

... yourself a favor: Get the right glasses ! Let me tell you my story: With age the eye will adapt less to watching things in different distances. So I have gotten myself variofocal glasses. And a stiff neck and strong headache, when working a lot in front of a screen. Why ? Because the area needed for the screen distance is placed low on the glass. To see a sharp image I had to raise my head, which created stress to the neck. Whenever I worked long hours like that, everything stiffend up and gave me all sort of trouble. Little exercises to loosen things up helped, but not for long. Then I got myself new variofocal glasses, just for the screen work. They are not set to „infinite“ on the far end, but to about 3-4 m, and the low end is document viewing distance. When I look at the screen, the head has a natural angle now, and the stiffness and sore is gone. They make good reading glasses, too.

My solution for scanning on my i-devices is ScannerPro by readdle. It is fast, reliable even under low light conditions etc. The best feature is the possibility to create own workflows, without coding. I have created several workflows related to repetitive scanning & importing tasks. They take the scan (can be set to jpeg or pdf), tag it with a set of standard tags assigned to the workflow (like ScannerPro, 2019, Music, Events) and import it as a new note to the designated Evernote-Notebook. Often this is it - the note is there, tagged and available to search and retrieval without further effort.