Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Use the Right Tool for the Job

When I started freelancing I used email to store lots of things my clients would send me. I would get emails with logins, scripts, web addresses and other important information. Where did I put it? In a folder of course in my email. There in lies the problem though. Email is for sending and receiving information. It's where it excels. Where it doesn't excel is in the storage and organisation of data.

Rather than be burdened with a tons of different folders I opted to have a folder for each of my clients. However, some clients generate a substantially greater amount of email than others do. With one particular client I get a handful of emails from them on a weekly basis. Over the last nine months I have accrued hundreds of emails from them, but finding some of the information has become difficult to do.

Email just wasn't designed for storing and organising data. Yes emails can be indexed and searched using a number of different search parameters now, but it only searches on the information the email already has. Also not all email clients and services allow you to tag emails with any information you want. Then there's the email itself. How do we edit it? By forwarding it to ourselves with some notes on it? Nice idea, but that in turn generates even more email. That's really not what we want.

Today I spent over an hour clambering through a series of folders looking for important information so I can transfer it to Evernote. Armed with Evernote's system I was quickly able to organise all the information from emails and tag them accordingly. Now when I need that information, I can not only search for it by the content of that information, but I can also search using the tags I have assigned to each one.

Tools have their uses. Email excels at sending and receiving information, but it's an inferior contender to applications like Evernote. Do yourself a favour and start using the right tool for the job.

How many people have you encountered in life that have really left a lasting impression on you for most of your life? I know of one that immediately springs to mind. My Grandfather, or Papa as we was affectionately known to all his grandchildren and great grandchildren.

When I was about nine years old my family returned back home to Scotland after living in Canada for four years. We lived with my grandparents for a few weeks before we had our own house. It was during this time that I encountered the first computer I had ever seen, a ZX81. It was the strangest contraption I had seen. My Papa showed me how to load games on it and type in basic instructions.

While this was my first encounter with a computer it wasn't my first introduction to programming. A little later on my Papa bought an Atari 800XL. During one of my many visits to my grandparents house, I watched my Papa typing furiously into his computer. I moved round to look at the screen and seen lines and lines of text with each line prefixed by a number.

Always inquisitive about stuff, I asked what it was and he told me he was typing in the instructions for a game into the computer or a program as he called it. Once all the instructions were typed in, you could run the game. He showed me the game once it was complete and explain what the different parts of the code do.

To start programming in your 50's is quite a feat, especially given the lack of programming resources and aids that were available at the time, but he was such a clever man and was always looking for something to dabble in.

Since those days of watching my Papa writing code on his Atari, I've always had a computer at some point in my life. From a couple of Spectrums I made the jump to a PC in the 90's. Through a number of different PC's I've ended up where I am today typing this on a MacBook Pro. What started out as a little hobby through my childhood has turned into a career that I thoroughly enjoy doing.

This morning my Papa, my first programming mentor, passed away.

It wasn't expected, but he was very old and suffered from a number of health issues including dementia and macular degeneration. Whether it's expected or not, it's always hard news to digest.

One memory that will always stick with me though is the hours he spent showing me what you can do with a few lines of code and computer. From those first days of writing programs in BASIC, it has shaped me into what I do today, a person who not only earns a living from writing code but also thoroughly enjoys doing it.

Quite a lasting impression I think you'll agree.

Habits That Didn't Stick

I've tried to start a number of new habits over the last few months, some of them have stuck, some of them haven't. Here's the ones that didn't stick.

  1. Reading 2 books a month - Not really an unrealistic habit but perhaps should have been changed to 'read at least two books a month'. I've scrapped this in favour of just having a list of books that I can work through when I can. Some books take longer than others, so why timeframe it? It detracts from the enjoyment that a book brings. Try this instead - Just make sure you have a couple of fiction books beside your bed and keep reading them. When you finish one, replace it.
  2. Logging something I learned everyday - I did keep a separate Journalong file for this but some days you just haven't learned anything significantly new. Instead I just log these as they happen. No sense in making a daily habit of it.
  3. Mind mapping - I really wanted to start mind mapping again but the truth is I see little benefit in it now. I think mind mapping has its uses but it's just not on my radar now of things I want to keep doing. Yes I realise that as a past mind mapping blogger this is probably considered blasphemy but opinions change.

The thing is when you set out to start a new habit, it doesn't always work. If you really want it to work, you'll set aside the time to do it and keep on doing it. It will eventually stick.

If it doesn't, then just let it go. When a habit doesn't stick, it's not defeat. It's just your way of saying, I don't need this.

Why I'm Considering Evernote Again

Plain text files. I love them. They're portable, easy to manipulate and work with hundreds of different tools. The only thing about them I don't like is they are a nightmare to organise.

Unless you've got an indexing and search tool that does all the hard work of collating them together, you're screwed. Now add to the mix that not all my files are in plain text. I've got an increasing number of documents that are PDFs, spreadsheets and even a few Word documents. It's getting out of control.

In the past I used Evernote, but at the time I felt I didn't have a need for such a tool. I didn't have clients, invoices, projects, ideas, side-products, documents and other stuff all vying for my attention. This stuff needs to go somewhere. Somewhere that I can find it again.

So I'm considering Evernote again. I had no issues with it in the past other than I wasn't using it to its full potential. There's definitely a place for it in my list of everyday tools. I've got so much going on just now and the last thing I need is to be wasting time looking for documents or notes. I need this stuff and I need it fast. Let's hope that Evernote can fit my needs.