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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Doin' it on paper

This one goes out to all of you who are keeping it together on paper, hipster, index cards or whatever.

My question relates to living in a digital world while using pen and paper to track your tasks and projects. I'd like to know what your experience is like, given that so much of our information comes to us via email or the web. So much of the information related to (my) tasks comes in email, for example. Do you re-write information on your cards or in your pen and paper system, that originated in email? Do you find this a good thing mentally or a pain? If you do use paper and pen to manage your tasks, then do you also use an electronic system? Do you print out electronic stuff and add to it with pen and then enter hand-written tasks?

Basically, I'm interested in knowing how people who work with paper and pen deal with their information that arrives electronically.

Thanks in advance for your insights!

TOPICS: Lofi
mcnicks's picture

Do you re-write information on...

ozhuner wrote:
Do you re-write information on your cards or in your pen and paper system, that originated in email?

The short answer to this, for me, is yes! More specifically, I have found that many of the emails that I receive will either contain multiple actions, badly specified actions or no actions whatsoever, so I use the process of writing the action onto a bit of paper (or 3x5 card in my case) as a way of filtering and extracting the 'real' next actions.

 
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