It’s not too late to resuscitate those good intentions and, thanks to some clever tech, turn them into action
Cut the clutter
There are few things more dispiriting than a mountain of paperwork that needs sorting and filing. Ensure yours doesn’t swell any further this year by requesting that your bills and statements be sent in electronic form. More and more companies and organisations offer this option. Granted, its probably to save money rather than the environment, but why not turn their greed to your advantage?
Resist at all costs the temptation to print documents. This would simply put you back where you were – worse off in fact because you’d be paying for the paper and ink rather than the senders. This can be a bit of an adjustment for those of us schooled in the importance of keeping paper records.
Capture other important documents like passports, air tickets and receipts using a scanner or cellphone camera and they’ll be available long after the originals are lost or faded.
Then make sure you organise this information, either in virtual files on your computer or, even better, in a cloud-based programme like Evernote. This way if anything happens to your PC, your documents will survive.
Get organised
Evernote is a lot more than an archiving tool. It’s also a superb programme for organising your thoughts and recording them, without the added pressure of sharing them with the world on social networks, although it gives you the option to do so.
A “note” can take many forms – a piece of formatted text, a webpage, a photograph, a voice clip, or even a handwritten “ink” note. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched and exported. Evernote’s available for all major operating systems, smartphones and tablets. There’s a premium, paid version for power users, but the free version is more than adequate for most needs.
Diarise it
Older readers will remember, or indeed still practise, that early January ritual of sitting down and transcribing the previous year’s annual diary entries into the new book. For most of us this is a tiresome, and today, totally unnecessary, chore.
All computers, smartphones and tablets come with electronic calendars. Most let you link to an online calendar, like those offered by Google’s Gmail and Facebook, and synchronise this information on all your devices, so it isn’t lost if one crashes or goes missing.
Backup
On the subject of gadgets imploding or going walkabout, new year is the perfect excuse to stop talking about and start backing up your data. Portable hard drives are relatively inexpensive and backup software on all recent computer operating systems means this is far less of a schlep than it used to be.
The problem with a local backup set-up like this is that if your computer is stolen or destroyed by say a fire, chances are your backup hard drive will have shared the same fate. This is why you’d be mad not to use a cloud storage solution like Sugarsync, Dropbox or Carbonite.
Most offer free, or inexpensive, basic versions and operate in the background backing up your precious data to the cloud.
An added bonus is that you can access this information from a range of devices, including most smartphones. I discovered just how useful this can be when I popped into a bank recently to close an unused credit card account. After queueing I was asked for details I didn’t have.
In the past I’d have had to abort the exercise. Instead, out came my cellphone and within seconds I was using Sugarsync to browse the online backup of my home PC’s My Document folder and opening the required document.
* For more information and links to all the applications and services mentioned in this column, visit geekbeard.posterous.com. Got any questions? Tweet me @alanqcooper and I’ll be happy to answer them. - Sunday Tribune