Friday, October 21, 2005

Managing info Digitally

I used to have all my little "pieces of info" on pieces of paper, spiral notebooks, etc.

Then I graduated to a Franklin Planner, and used that during the mid-80s well into the late 90s.

Then I got a PDA and incorporated all that into my trusty Handspring Pro, which I still use. I wore out my first one, I'm on #2.

Managing information in my computer is another issue. I've tried several things--word documents, FileMaker Pro databases, Entourage, and now a nice program called "DevonThink Pro."

All those emails I want to save, bits and pieces of info related to education, business, personal, etc. all are stuffed in a DevonThink Pro database. It's 100 MB but now it's finally all consolidated (been working for some months). I still have a few things to sort and split (to transfer from FM Pro to DevonThink it was necessary to export multiple records as long text files, and now they have to be re-split into records). Ah well it give me a chance to cull out unimportant/outdated stuff.

DevonThink Pro is by devontechnologies.com.