I was a complete sucker for it, and it cleared my desk and became the go-to place for my notes for around a year. It even has a whole community dedicated to hacking it to install a far better and more feature-rich Operating System than comes as standard. Equally, don’t be afraid to ditch what isn’t working and move on (and so, top tip, keep the box of anything physical that you buy, so you can maximise the resale value).Ī case in point for me is the reMarkable 2, 3 a high-end piece of digital paper that works excellently as a replacement for a messy desk and syncs wonderfully with computers as well having great OCR abilities. Due diligence can only get you so far in terms of how something actually works for you. Like desks and chairs, there are certain bits of software that we all have to have, an Office-like package, a Zoom-ish thing, but beyond those we need to find and try tools that suit not just what we do, but the way we do what we do.ĭon’t be too precious, much legal work comes in distinct cases, so you could try something for a case or two and then ditch it if it doesn’t work. In this space I’m still unsure of the benefits of using our mobiles to pay for stuff, especially when it comes to transport, as anyone who’s always getting caught at ticket barriers behind someone who’s Apple/Google Pay isn’t playing ball will understand. I think my experience with the reMarkable 2 (see below) sits in this camp. Equally, at the other end of the scale is tech-for-tech’s sake, something I can be quite partial to. Whilst it’s great to feel that you only need an ink pot and vellum, they don’t really cut it in the modern workplace, and at some point you’ll have to move on. Being a Luddite is a bad choice, being a tech over-adopter can be worse A simple suggestion for trying to get some perspective on where improvements can be made in your workflow is identifying what things constantly drive you nuts and see if there’s a way to stop them happening, both by you not having to deal with this anymore and others not having to deal with the same issues from you. The problem for many of us is that we can’t see another way of working, we still think that the vertical inbox is the only communication game in town, or that a PDF editor is the only way to read PDFs (when you possibly never edit PDFs). You should be focusing on the brain work that you are paid for, so you need tools that help to minimise the admin and make the brain stuff as efficient as possible. All these things don’t only take time, they take cognitive energy, leaving less for the stuff that really counts. In other words, without all the excess admin of opening and reopening documents, or the copying of hand-written notes to a computer, or, as in my case (as was), the time-consuming typing up of the plan-for-the-day that only I’m going to read. I should instead perhaps have said, understand how you should be working. If you work in a relentlessly reactive way in which you are constantly overwhelmed, that is beyond the scope of this article, I suggest you stop right now ( everything you are doing) and read Cal Newport’s A World Without Email, 2 then come back when you’re done. How do you tack the fine line between improving your workflow or capsizing under a solution that leaves you floundering? Understand how you workīefore you do anything, understand how you work. Using the right tools can completely transform the way you work or bog you down with a solution that is more cumbersome than what you had before. How to sort the tech needs from the tech thneeds. Non-essential office tech that can transform your work.
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