Thing 14
This week’s Thing focused on Personal Information Management (PIM), that is, organizing and storing information and activities in the form of hand written notes, folders on a desktop, in emails, etc. There were two tasks this week, the first was to use Evernote and the second was to use two of the smaller tools mentioned, I chose Remember the Milk and Pocket.
Having set up an Evernote account I began to compile a to-do-list of all the major activities that I have to complete at the moment, I created tags for the list and added in some links. Overall, I feel Evernote has a lot of scope and (since I am hoping to go to library school next academic year) it would be very useful for keeping track of essays and other assignments.
I set up some tasks in Remember the Milk and added in some short but important notes to each of the tasks. Remember the Milk would be helpful in the future for keeping track of essay and other assignment due dates; however, I think it would be simpler to just use Evernote rather than both tools. The main advantage, that I found, of Remember the Milk over Evernote was the ‘reminder’ function, other than that I think Evernote is more useful.
For Pocket I saved a couple of WebPages and news articles and on the whole I felt that Pocket would be helpful for college and for saving academic articles for assignments in the future as well as for general use in saving articles that I find interesting. A drawback to Pocket is that I can already bookmark and favourite WebPages on my laptop, however, it might be easier to separate personal and college/work ‘read later’ items using Pocket for the college/work items.
Overall, this was an interesting Thing and allowed me to continue to expand my knowledge of various information service tools. For me, the most promising of the tools, and the one I will be most likely to use, was Evernote. Most of my current notes and lists are on pieces of paper (some in a notebook while others are scattered around the house!), I have a somewhat chaotic note and list management system but it is organized chaos! Despite the clean and efficient nature of Evernote, Remember the Milk and Pocket I still feel that my instinct will still be to reach for a pen and paper first when making any sort of a list or note. I will keep an open mind though, and these tools may become very useful for college next year!
