Sometimes I make jokes about being forgetful. Old age, you know. But the reality is often that I suffer from information overload. Ministry or sermon ideas, new tools, results of important studies, passwords, logins, appointments, things-I-want-to-read (or watch) later… it goes on and on.
So a few years ago, I started looking for a way to gather a lot of this “stuff” into one place where I could easily get back to it. I found a program called “Stickybrain” (which sounds gross, but weirdly fit). The program was simple: I would create a new “note” for each piece of info I wanted to save. Passwords, logins, interesting web articles and registration info were some of the most common things I tossed into the program. Later, when I wanted to find the info, I just typed ANY word that was in the note and the program would present it to me.
The people I worked with started dropping by my office “what’s the login for…,” “do you have that article we were discussing?” “do you happen to remember the registration code for…,” “what was that website you mentioned…,” and so on.
Anyway, nowadays, I use multiple devices to get to info. I have my computer at work and one at home, a laptop as well as my iPhone. So it’s important to get to my data from anywhere.
If you think you would benefit from an extra pile of memory, check out a service called “Evernote.” It’s free, and there’s a web version, or you can install software on your PC, Mac or iPhone. If you have all three, Evernote will keep the data synchronized across them.
And Evernote captures all sorts of info: web pages, snippets of web pages, PDFs, etc. And it has many more tricks up its sleeve.
Or, if you’d rather keep your data on your own computer and not on a server on the internet, check out Yojimbo. It’s a great way to store the variety of stuff that we need to get out of our heads and stored for quick retrieval. Yojimbo is for Mac OS X. I’m still looking for a comparable Windows program. If you know of one, let me know.
Follow Us!