How to simplify your digital life

[cacheborn]

As I clean my house, I am attracting cleanliness and clarity in other areas as well. Here is a an interesting article that I came across. Some of the tips I follow already. Especially liked the scheduling of digital purging.

20 Tips to Simplify Your Digital and Online Life

Not sure about Google Desktop yet. Anyone has used it?

[Sansone]

I used google desktop a few years ago, and it was actually pretty phenomenal.

I installed it on a secondary machine for test purposes, cause I'm a little paranoid about having something installed on my machine with that kind of power.

It takes a while to do its initial indexing, which it does on its own and in the background. After that though, the sky's the limit. It's as good as the search engine itself.

I ended up being the tech guy for an internet retailer, which was basically 11 totally disorganized people in an office. After wasting some time designing what I thought were useful systems, I decided to try installing desktop and it was hugely successful.

There were spreadsheets, database files, different types of docs with notes and what not, it was a real mess.

With desktop, they could type in a customer's name or phone number and immediately find every order and contact with that customer. Just the ability to find which spreadsheet files contain certain data is tremendously useful.

One thing in particular that was also great was the ability to type in a model number, and see if it showed up on spreadsheets or docs that we occasionally got with lists of discontinued items. Since this stuff came from a few dozen different manufacturers, it was sometimes a sheet, word doc, pdf, or just text in an email.

Yeah, it would bring up outlook emails too. We had one supplier we chatted with on AIM, it would even show up that stuff.

As useful as it was in that sense, I personally disagree with this sentiment from the article:

18. Organizing your digital documents in multiple folder structures is a waste of time and is not really required.

Ultimately, for the way I like to work, having stuff foldered out nicely is the way to go. There are still a lot of things where searching isn't the most efficient way to go.

Photos are the easiest example, it would take longer to name all my photos than it does to folder them by season and year.

Even client files, each client gets a folder and then I have a set workflow. draft1, draft1a, draft2, whatever. Stuff I'm not actively working on gets into an archive folder so my main client folder only has a few items in it. I wouldn't gain much from text based search.

So depending on intended use and paranoia levels, it has the potential to be hugely helpful.

[CoolBee]

@Cache - synchronous ho'oponopono again

Anyway, I have been working on clearing up my digital life for some time. I couldn't live with only 2 email accounts though because I have more than one 'business' and want to keep stuff separated.

I should get round to posting my list of handy tools sometime!

[cacheborn]

Thanks Sansone for the report. I agree with you, I don't think organizing folders is a waste of time. One reason I was hesitant about using Google Desktop was that I don't want to be too dependent on it. Your reply has got me interested, I will have a look at it. Knowing the innovative nature of Google, I am sure there will be many useful features.

[cacheborn]

Originally Posted by CoolBee

@Cache - synchronous ho'oponopono again

Anyway, I have been working on clearing up my digital life for some time. I couldn't live with only 2 email accounts though because I have more than one 'business' and want to keep stuff separated.

I should get round to posting my list of handy tools sometime!

Yes the synchronicity is amazing.

I think two accounts is not to be taken too seriously. I have four, use two of them rarely.

[Sansone]

I need more than 2 emails also. Easiest thing I've found for that is to have all incoming mail from all addresses forward to my main gmail and use labels with different colors.

This way I'm only actually checking one place, only have to use whatever else I have for outgoing stuff.

[CoolBee]

I use Windows Live Mail to import and send all my emails from about 20 email accounts so it's not painful and all my mail is in one place. Hardest thing is forcing myself to manually sign on to all every 2-3 months to make sure I still remember the passwords! There is one account that I have totally forgotten the password for but luckily WLM hasn't! Must get round to changing it!

[EternalOne]

Originally Posted by cacheborn

As I clean my house, I am attracting cleanliness and clarity in other areas as well. Here is a an interesting article that I came across. Some of the tips I follow already. Especially liked the scheduling of digital purging.

20 Tips to Simplify Your Digital and Online Life

Thanks for sharing, some useful tips