Two steps forward, one step back

Moving to #100percentdigital is not for the faint of heart.  It’s not easy or seamless, despite having a great support team (thank you Danny, Rebecca and Jill!).  Ideally I would translate my existing practices into a digital process and my life would be easier and simpler (with sunshine, kittens and rainbows).  But when that can’t happen, you have to decide what you’re willing to change or give up, and whether the digital benefits make the trade-off worth while.

I attend many meetings, and I like to take notes directly on the agenda.  I indicate follow-up items and close the loop when they are complete. That sounds like a pretty straightforward (to me) process that should translate well to digital.  Alas, no, at least under the constraints here.  My files are stored in Box which allows me to access them anywhere (the cloud!) with a handy back-up on my hard drive.  Any software or process I use needs to work with Box. Goodbye One Note.  I have been creating and/or saving agendas in Word/Box.  On my iPad I’ve used CloudOn to open the file from Box.  It’s slow, but does allow editing of Word files.  But CloudOn crashes or freezes frequently, so time to try something else.  Office 365 only works with OneDrive, so that’s out.

My goal is to tag action items and have them drop into a To Do list for me, as well as tag for meetings with others (and sometimes action items for another person).  EverNote seems like the solution for that, but it doesn’t allow the agenda to be annotated directly.  Looks like I’ll need to give up on that, and instead take notes on a different document but save within a notebook in EverNote that also contains the agenda.  Not ideal, but perhaps a reasonable trade-off.

I’m surprised that it’s not easier to move to #100percentdigital.  I figured that someone else had this all worked out already.  It reminds me of being a Girl Scout troop leader (yeah, I did that for 2 years).  I assumed that weekly activities could just be pulled off the shelf, but each troop meeting required enormous preparation.  (And that was for an organization founded in 1912, which I thought would have set up a system to make it easy for troop leaders).  I have a long way to go in achieving that #100percentdigital goal.

There’s good news too! I’m mostly paperless by now, but I confess to bringing paper back-ups for mission critical meetings when a technology failure (hello CloudOn) would be enormously problematic.  But Rebecca hasn’t been able to buy anyone coffee (yet).  I head out on vacation tomorrow, and I’m just bringing my iPad.  I’m looking forward to the portability of the iPad when traveling, and feeling comfortable that I can handle any technology problems that arise, although I know that Danny has my back, and I can use my Apple Care for support while abroad.

Next up: Notes from Abroad and Adventures with EverNote