To support a greener lifestyle and reduce clutter, I try to work in a paperless. environment. I have been looking for an electronic way to capture and store, “my stuff”. I have a ton of it and you never know when you might need it. Believe it or not, I find that I need alot of it often.

So, one of the best self-help books I ever read was given to me by my good friend, Jeff. Getting Things Done is hardcore, I am not as good as others, but I have learned to keep my inbox to a minimum. GTD says zero each day, my goal is less than 20. There is quite a bit more to GTD but this was a huge takeaway for me.

Anything I want to store as part of an ongoing “project” goes in Evernote. I have developed a very simple system for organizing. I use the notebooks in Evernote for projects or sub-projects. I name them by @projectname ( I wish they had subnotebooks). The way to organize data in Evernote is via “tags”. I didn’t get it initially and I am not sure I am 100% sold, but I am running with it. So, I place multiple tags on each posting in a notebook, usually with a #subject, *contactname, keyword. Seems insane, but it remembers all my tags, so many of the @, #, * are very similar. I simply pick them from a list. So, lets say I have a call scheduled with *jim. I can sort by “*jim“, all the topics are then listed by #subject and I have all my notes, clippings, attachments (with Evernote Premium) and things that are high priority I tag with a #1. Seems complicated, but it is working really well. Any files stored other places, no problem, hyperlinks handle that.

Now, all “other” email, not pressing,”FYI stuff” I delete and use Xobni to search, sort, find attachments etc. It is the coolest “find” of last year. I saw a post thought the name was cool, INBOX backwards and it is a SCORE! Go grab it, trust me.

Working in the CAE world on multiple computers and being a globetrotter I deal with massive file sets (CAD, CFdesign, images etc), bigger picture stuff then stuff I’d store into Evernote. I used to carry around a 100GB external drive and though I was bad ass, found that this did nothing but get filled with data. So, I still have that (3 actually) but for the important documents I use 2 systems. The first is Live Mesh. Very cool way to flag a folder on one machine, upload the content to the web and include a folder on another machine. So, I have the data in 3 locations, seems like overkill, but it allows me to work seamlessly on local drives (external drives) are shady when dealing with CAD and Simulation files. Live Mesh is free and allows 5GB, not too bad. Live Mesh used to be all I used when I had a Windows Mobile phone. As there was a mobile version as well.

BUT I just jumped on the iPhone bandwagon and Live Mesh is no dice for iPhone. I also use my beloved Ubuntu Netbook, doesn’t play nice with Mesh. So, I use my trusted box.net as well to share mostly Office docs back and forth among all my devices. It has an awesome iPhone client and Open Office works like a charm on my netbook.