#digital organisation

[academiceve]

Digital Minimalism Journey

I’ve started my digital minimalism journey over a year ago now. I’ve written about wanting to switch to digital planning, as well as how I organise my digital life at university and favourite apps/websites, so I highly recommend you take a look at those posts too. 

I stumbled across a video by Kraig Adams on YouTube, which you can watch HERE and it inspired me to clean up my own files and organise everything. I wanted to simplify my file storage, so that I would have everything in one place, find the best planning system and organise my e-mails. 

E-MAILS

I started by organising my e-mail inboxes and deleting accounts. I used to have 7 active accounts! I know! I don’t know how it happened but with old university inbox, new grad school inbox, two spam e-mail accounts and personal and blog inboxes, I ended up with 7 e-mail accounts. I started with deleting e-mails from my spam accounts, which I used to use for signing up for websites. I made a list of the most important accounts to change the e-mail addresses to and deleted the backlog of all of the e-mails. It’s a mundane task that feels really good to do! I closed my Yahoo e-mail account because they’re known for selling their users e-mail addresses to different companies, so that they could make money, while you receive weird spam e-mails and switched to GMail. Currently, I only have 3 GMail accounts (personal, university and business) and one account for iCloud and spam mails from different websites that I’m registered at. 

I’m making sure that they’re not cluttered with old e-mails that I don’t need. After reading a new e-mail, I think about whether I will need the information to refer back to and if the answer is no, I archive the e-mail. My inbox then works like a to-do list, only keeping the e-mails that I know I will have to look at again. This is a great system for decluttering your inboxes and keeping only the most important information.

DOCUMENTS AND COMPUTER FILES

Besides e-mails, I also organised all of my digital documents and computer files and am now using Google Drive as the primary cloud system. I currently back all of my photos and most important documents on a USB drive; however, I need to invest on an external drive to back up all of my documents. I always have a lot of articles and lecture notes scattered around on my desktop, as I also treat it like a to-do list and once I don’t need it anymore, I delete them to save space and keep my laptop clutter free. Can’t wait to be done with my internship, so that I can clear everything out! 

DIGITAL PLANNING TOOLS

It’s the best way to keep everything in one place, paper free but this could also apply to those of you who would like to have an efficient digital planning system, while still using a paper planner. Personally, I still use both, but I don’t always have the time to fill out my paper planner weekly. 

My to-do lists live on Trello! I love how convenient it is to make to-do lists and categorise items according to importance, as well as mark if they’re complete or not. I always go to Trello first before writing down events/things I need to do in my planner. You can create boards for different areas in your life, for example, I have one for daily tasks, my blog and university. Within those boards you can create to-do lists and I follow a simple layout of having separate lists for “To-Do”, “Doing” and “Done”, as well as “Random” for interesting things to research/or important things that will take longer to complete. Meanwhile, my university board consists of lists according to the courses that I’m currently taking and my thesis research project. 

I also use iCalendar for lectures, assignments/deadlines, work and social events. This is where I plan my time and can see what I am supposed to do/be that day. What I love about iCalendar is that it is synced with my phone/macbook, as well as my Google Calendar and I can easily import calendars if I need to track them. I usually view it in the weekly layout, so that I know what to anticipate that week. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Digital planning tools are extremely efficient and relatively easy to maintain. As I’ve mentioned earlier, although I keep a physical planner, I don’t always have time to write down to-do lists or reflect on my weeks worth of activities. Having this digital planning system is great because I can access it on the go, as well as quickly add items as they come up!

So this is how I’ve been organising my life in a minimal way for the past year. It’s efficient and has been working well for me. I hope there are more digital minimalists out there or maybe this post inspired you to organise your digital files!

Here’s a list of videos for digital minimalism:

4 rules for digital minimalism 

The key to happiness in a distracted world

Simplify your inbox: digital minimalism 

If you would like to read more from me, click HERE to see other blog posts! You can also follow my studygram HERE for some inspiration! 

[academiceve]

How I Organise My Digital Life for University

I needed to buy a new laptop for graduate school because my old one couldn’t be trusted anymore, which also meant that I had an opportunity to start with a clean slate and organise all of my files... This is a very mundane task that we never want to do but we should and I stumbled across digital minimalism videos on YouTube. They inspired me to change my digital organisation system, a.k.a. I never had one before so it’s time to build new habits! This change was for the better and now I’m hooked and cannot wait share this information with you all!

Google Drive is my preferred cloud system where I will take and store digital notes (shocking, I know! I’m finally switching to mostly digital notes!!!). I have it downloaded and synced with my mac. I also use Google Photos to store all of my old photos. It is also most used by other students and I love the functionality of being able to share and collaborate on documents/presentations with others if it is needed (i.e. for group projects). I’m storing all of my old or most important personal documents on a big USB flash drive (64 gb) because I can carry it with me and old unused documents that I might need to access one day will not be taking up space on my mac. 

Trello is what I will be using for planning instead of a bullet journal! It’s a digital to-do list app that you can access on all of your devices and I love that you can create separate boards and have as many to-do list running as you need. For example, I have three boards: personal, blog/social media and university, which allows me to separate all of my tasks. You can also make checklists, colour code tasks and even collaborate with other people. It’s truly wonderful and changed how I feel about digital planning/organisation and there’s a great YouTube channel called Simpletivity that shares useful tutorials on how to manage your files or increase your productivity by using Trello, Google Drive, etc. 

iCalendar/Google Calendar I didn’t know this but you can sync your Google Calendar with your iCalendar! I’ve bene using iCalendar since I bought my mac (because I find it easier to use on a mac than an iPhone) and creating separate calendars for home/personal, work and social media and syncing it with my university’s Google calendar. It’s wonderful to finally have everything in one place and since I’m also using Trello and an academic physical planner this organisational system just works better for me. 

E-mails I started my digital minimalism journey with seven e-mail accounts (yes, I know! Really seven!) and I managed to lower that number to three, one of which is my new school e-mail. It’s been one of the most amazing changes that I’m beyond happy to have finally made! I also used tips from the digital minimalism video about deleting/archiving all of my old e-mails’ and keeping the inboxes clean, as it works sort of like a to-do list, meaning that if you have e-mails in your inbox they’re a task that needs to be completed. This is another positive change in my digital life!

Feedly is a useful website that allows you to organise all of your consumed media in one place, including newspaper/magazine publications, media websites and blogs, journals, as well as YouTube channels and RSS feeds! You can organise your feeds by different categories and I divided mine into beauty/fashion, news and academic publications (scientific journals on topics that interest me). I only need to visit one website to find all of my consumed media channels, instead of having them saved in my bookmarks! 

These are the main apps/websites that I use for digital organisation and I cannot rave about digital minimalism enough, it truly helped me maximise my productivity and also keep my files looking sane! If you’re interested in starting your own journey, I highly recommend you check out Kraig Adams, Simpletivity on YouTube and watch this video by Blue Ollis. 

If you would like to read more from me, click HERE to see other blog posts! You can also follow my studygram HERE for some inspiration! 

[tofutofii]

So Pinterest is a top down approach of organising I think

Boards > Sections > Pins

Tumblr is a bottom up approach

Posts > Tags > Search

Preferring bottom up nowadays, it's much more intuitive and is used by a lot of organising software.

[docmation]

“Digital transformation” is often misunderstood as just “going digital” — having a website, a Social Media account or online shopping.

[minimalistic-maggie]

Hey man, we should get lunch sometime.

Definitely a member of this “club”.

Important stuff:

Stay on task constantly. This is hard. Find a way to do it. Sometimes I set a translucent, floating Stickie with my current task to be at the top of my screen. Or write it on a post it note and put it on the side of your screen. Whatever it takes.

A task will take up as much time as you give it. Use Pomodoros or some other timer method to try to confine tasks to a certain length.

Setting a timer really helped me a lot. I felt a sense of pressure to get shit done. And definitely there was some 80/20 rule happening when I did this.

Turn off all notifications on your phone.

This is a big one. When I was working on a workshop for Intel which I had poorly planned. I turned on Do Not Disturb on my devices. It worked very well.

I could go on quoting and citing, but I have to go back to work!

[momentsinlondon]

Sense of belongingness

When you come to London from abroad or from another city, chances are you know, at least, one person. A friend from high school, a family friend, a friend of a friend etc. No matter how many people you know, no one can deny that feeling a part of a community is difficult to be achieved in London. 

Everyone is running in this city. Running for their job, their hobbies, their friends, their relationships. And that’s great. But what happens if you don’t have a group of friends? What happens if you have friends but lack this sense of community? I will tell you what you need to do. You find your passion and you start volunteering. Whether this passion lies in your profession or in other aspects of your life, you will find yourself  meeting people, investing your time at a goal, you may learn something about your profession or yourself and most of all while the time goes by, you will find yourself feeling more and more secure. 

That’s at least what happened with me. I decided to join Outreach Digital, a charity that organises free events to share digital knowledge, in order to get involved and be surrounded by digital professionals as my dream lies in becoming a Digital Marketer. When joining my ultimate goal was to get some hands-on experience with Social Media. The sense of belongingness didn’t even exist at that point. Maybe I didn’t think about it, maybe I wasn’t in the right mood to chase it, maybe I didn’t know I needed that. Odd thing is that after being a member for about 4 months, and after my contract at my last job finished I found myself being surrounded by people that I felt they cared about me, being constantly on the move and feeling I am not on my own. 

During our last meeting, the founder asked us what we enjoy about being a member of Outreach Digital. For me it was obvious, it was the sense of belongingness, the sense of Community, the sense that I know I am not alone and that all together we can achieve many things! 

Live long Outreach Digital! Thank you for having me as a member!

Find your own Community and believe me London can be a great city when you beat this loneliness! 

[hlilje]

Digital Life and Organisation

Organisation is something I fancy quite a bit, and I'm always looking for more ways to get myself (and thus my digital life) more organised. I currently accomplish this using a number of different cloud services and software. Here is a fairly complete list of the things I'm currently using and a short motivation on why I am using them:

Email: Gmail

A no-brainer really, Gmail got me into using Google's services in the first place, and it is easily the best thing I have done to my digital life and organisation. A fully cloud base email suite which does everything I wan't it to, and more, while giving me access to Google's huge suite of cloud based services.

Calendar: Google Calendar

It does the job and syncs with my Android phone, mainly used for the integration with my Google account. There are several things that could be improved or added to it, like tags and a less buggy Android integration, but for now I see no other cloud based competitor being relevant enough to switch to.

Documents: Google Drive

Mainly used thanks to the integration/conversion of Google Docs, which is my office suite of choice. I like having all my documents stored in the cloud only, and now that I can easily upload all my other offline documents to Drive using the desktop client, it all merges really nicely. The functionality of Google Drive as a complete office suite is a bit limited, but for general applications it does the job fine. It's a shame that lots of PDF's are unable to being opened in the online viewer, though.

Notes: Evernote

Works well mostly thanks to the nice Android app which syncs with my computer, and the computer program has some nifty things like the screen capture function, but there are three big areas of improvement. Firstly, the editor is really bugged on the PC version regarding the formatting, and the Android version has some problems like non-supported formatting as well. Secondly, the way syncing is handled on the computer feels really dated, having a big 'sync' button you have to press or auto-syncing in like 15 minute-intervalls is rather old school, and can be dangerous if you forget to sync your notes before turning off the computer. Not to mention all the possible sync conflicts that may arise. The Android version has instant upload though. I feel like with all the good amount of instantly syncing and cloud based software available in 2012 this way of handling it just isn't justified. The third thing I'm missing is a Windows 7 gadget for displaying some notes on the desktop, like the standard Windows 7 Sticky Notes-thingy. I really need some way to force myself to look at important to-do tasks, and I don't always have the Evernote software opened/focused.

Fun fact: in order to remember things I have to do online, I just fill my desktop with links to the websites in question. This really bugs me who always want my desktop to be clean and tidy, and thus basically forces me to do the things just in order to get my desktop clean again.

Program components and working projects: Dropbox

Dropbox as a service generally outperforms Google Drive in almost every aspect like reliability, functions, speed, etc., but since Drive comes with office functionality I use it for all my 'documents'. Everything else I store in the cloud with Dropbox, especially program components like GIMP/Ableton Live/Renoise projects etc. It's also really handy to sync my whole Eclipse workspace to be able to program on my laptop without having to manually transfer data between it and my desktop.

Mobile camera uploads: Picasa (Google+) / Dropbox

The Android Google+ app has the nice feature of auto-uploading pictures and videos to my Picasa (and thus Google+) albums, for backup and such. There is no limit to how much data you are allowed to store this way, but it comes with the big drawback of resizing all your photos to ~2mpx, which of course isn't suitable as a way of permanent storage or backup. Thus I use the Dropbox Android app which has the same basic functionality, the difference being it doesn't resize or compress anything. That way I'm also able to get a proper backup of all my mobile photos. This does of course count towards my storage quota, but by disabling the desktop syncing of my mobile camera uploads folder I can pretend that it is a proper cloud service for storing my mobile photos, at least until I need that space for other things.

RSS reader: Google Reader

Not much to say here really, a RSS reader that does its job. Used since I already have my Google account and don't need more functionality than it offers.

Backup: SkyDrive

This I only started using lately to abuse the fact that I get 25 free gb's of storage for being a legacy SkyDrive user, which is nice to backup old photos and music production stuff, etc. I manage this by having moved the SkyDrive folder to my external hard drive which I generally use for storing all my media and backups that can't be stored in the cloud (music, old photos, program components and such), and then I simply put all the files I want to backup into it. Obviously I don't want to fill my desktop computer with media files like my old photos, so this way I can keep them stored at my external hard drive while still making a backup in the cloud. No, don't mention symbolic links.

Training: Endomondo

Training app derp.

Password security: LastPass

Probably the best thing I did to my digital life together with getting Gmail/a Google account. I won't go in to the details of how I got introduced to it and started using it, but lets just say that my password security went from non-existent to fairly safe, I would argue. Great service with lots of functionality if you dare to put all your passwords into the hands of LastPass (which you should). If you are being paranoid though, you can always use software like Keepass for offline management of your passwords, but considering the amount of functionality you lose from doing this, I personally don't think that it is worth it. And as you may imagine, I would always choose the cloud-based alternative over the local one.