A Clear Mind… and a Phone Chock Full of Ideas

The final exercise of the conference was to make a plan to implement all the cool stuff we’d just learned. Christine passed out a worksheet and asked us to review all of our notes and list out all of the action items we’d written down.

I found this step extremely easy. I just put my phone in the middle of the worksheet, leaned back and smiled. I could do this because I’d captured all of my notes and “to do” items in Evernote as they occurred to me.

As I sat there smiling, the man next to me asked me what I was doing. When I explained my system, he opened a notebook, took out a piece of paper with notes on it, and laid it on his worksheet. While everyone around us searched their notes and wrote them on the worksheet, we compared systems. It turns out we had very similar approaches. I just did mine in Evernote and he did his on paper.

Normally at a conference like this, I make lots of notes on the slide handouts or note pads. But I’ve found that once the conference is over, I rarely referenced those notes, so I needed a better way to process them. I knew that if I could get them in Evernote, then I’d process them at my next Weekly Review, and I’d actually take action on them. But I also knew that having to type in notes — especially on the tiny iPhone keyboard — would be time consuming, distracting, and error prone.

So I decided to still take handwritten notes on the handouts. But as I completed each note, I grabbed my phone and took a picture from within the Evernote app. Voila! Easy note-taking, easy capture.

Now, a couple of months later, all of those notes are in my system. And many of them are done. I’d call that success.