My Technology Odyssey Organizing Papers & Stuff

Many years ago, toward the end of a staff meeting at Full Sail University, we were being told that we needed to update some software on our company-issued MacBook Pros that we were using for our courses and one of my fellow professors complained, why are they always changing things?! I don’t know that I’d ever heard anyone complain when a tech company upgraded their software or product. It’s technology, that’s what technology companies do, they continually make a new version of their thing. That seemed so weird to me.

Then this past week I found myself at an Office Depot looking at spiral notebooks because they can be a convenient place to jot things down when the need arises. Some time ago I had invested in some cool pens and expensive notebooks and I wanted something a bit smaller that I can tuck in a pocket when I’m out and about. Then it dawned on me that I have an iPhone and iPad (with Apple Pencil!), that I’ve spent thousands of dollars on and always have with me, that are very good for note taking. So I left Office Depot without making a purchase.

I used to have this perfect app for note taking and doing research, that I used to create my graduate courses at Full Sail University. Not long after its launch in 2003 I started using a Mac app called Notebook by Circus Ponies. In a single file I could draft a whole class, with dividers to designate the assignments or class sessions or resources. On each page I could create annotated lists with paragraphs of information that I could expand or collapse/hide so that I could get an overview without opening or closing files. Because my course would be posted on an online platform I could save my work in HTML and Notebook wouldn’t mess with the formatting or code. The Notebook app, which expanded to becoming an iPad app, was the creation of a single programmer. I guess it eventually got to be too hard to maintain and the creator closed shop in 2016 and I have not found an adequate replacement.

Full Sail University EDM613 MAC - Media Asset Creation-Course description-Notebook — **Full Sail University EDM613 MAC – Media Asset Creation-Course description-Notebook by Circus Ponies**

I know that I’m an edge case when it comes to technology. Remember, I didn’t get into this to get “good at tech.” I was just looking for a better way to do my writing. So, along the way I started collecting everything and anything in print that I thought might be useful information for future writing projects: newspaper and magazine clippings, years of various computer and popular magazines, all of the research/source articles I xeroxed when writing my college paper and anything that I’d written. Before moving to Florida I had filled two four-drawer legal sized filing cabinets with stuff. Of course the problem was that I didn’t want to move all of that stuff across the country AND that finding or surfacing interesting information was problematic. That’s what digitizing all of this stuff was supposed to do. It was supposed to make everything just a search term away.

**1994-08 Two 4-Drawer Filing Cabinets (with Creagan & Jennifer)**

I got rid of the filing cabinets, but I still had dozens of boxes of files that I took with me to Florida. Then in 2014 when it looked like I’d be moving again, I bought a multi-page scanner and started digitizing as much stuff as possible. At the same time I was gathering dozens of online resources almost daily and just “bookmarking” URLs wasn’t working. So, while my projects were getting created and editing in Notebook, I was collecting URLs in Evernote. It was better than just bookmarking things, but finding stuff later was still problematic. I stopped using Evernote a few years ago because it was hard to find stuff or organize things in a way where things were easily resurfaced later.

Since the demise of Notebook by Circus Ponies (RIP), I’ve tried a lot of apps that use a notebook metaphor:

Microsoft OneNote: Too slow and took too much working memory
NoteTaker: Early Mac OSX app, was replaced by Notebook by Circus Ponies
Notability: I’ve been using various versions of this app for years. One road block was its limited nesting and inability to embed video media…. But it was one of the first to use the Apple Pencil and handwriting metaphor that I really want to use more of.
Outliner: Limited nesting, a bit too structured.
GoodNotes: Probably the app that I will be turning to, but I’m a bit discouraged by the learning curve.

One of the issues with the overall “notebook” metaphor is that it’s perfect for taking notes if you’re a college student with one set of notes for each class you’re taking. And that worked for me when I was creating one course or class. But right now I’m looking at a different kind of workflow. I’m gathering information that might be a source for one of my daily articles, or might be an area of general interest. I don’t have a 10- to 16- or 20-week class schedule to organize the information around.

Right now things of interest that pop-up in my feeds are saved in an app called Keep-It, unless the information looks like it might be a great daily article/blog post candidate. Ideas and resources for the daily articles at dropped into my Day One journal app. The daily articles are organized by the five themes (meditation/technology/news/education/media) and I usually write them in Day One and then copy the finished article to WordPress.

The Keep-It/Day One process works pretty well with single relatively short articles, but it suffers from the same searchable/discoverable issues when I think about bigger projects or archiving the thousands of resources that I’m working with or generating. Part of the problem is that I’m more than a little concerned about lock-in. I’ve been writing for a few decades and not all of my work is in a readable format because the app used might go all the way back to my days running CP/M or DOS. Fortunately most of that work was printed to paper but not all of it. I did a lot of writing which I saved/exported as printed PDF pages, but I’m still trying to figure out how to save the work in a future-proof format AND make the work searchable in a way that makes sense to me. I have over 5,000 articles saved in Evernote and I have no idea how I might pull that information that doesn’t require that I pour through the results one article at a time.

The work I did for Full Sail University I exported from Notebook to HTML and that kind’a works for archiving. The work I just completed for Cashman Middle School, all of the curriculum that I created and posted in the Canvas LMS, I figured out that I couldn’t just export it as a PDF (because of the interactive/embedded media), but I needed an HTML copy too. I didn’t do that with the Full Sail stuff so there’s a lot of classes where I’m missing the media that went into the lesson and I didn’t make a copy of it. I want to save that stuff for future use.

Any courses that I take or “professional development” that I do, I’ll probably use something like Good Notes, because the long-hand note taking is a proven learning enrichment activity. And I’ll probably use something like DEVONthink to organize my thousands of articles, archives and projects in progress. And if I’m working on anything longer than a single article I’ll probably use my long languishing copy of Scrivener to organize and develop.

Apologies for this longwinded “thinking out loud” exercise, but I apparently needed to process all of these ideas so I can figure how I can go forward, transitioning from having to create all of the curriculum that I’ve been doing for 28-years to writing these daily articles and the longer projects that I want to do. I certainly hope that your technology journey is far less cumbersome.