{"id":501,"date":"2018-02-12T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-12T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/?p=501"},"modified":"2018-02-12T07:19:13","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T12:19:13","slug":"getting-organized-in-2018-evernote-and-dropbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/blog\/2018\/02\/12\/getting-organized-in-2018-evernote-and-dropbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting organized in 2018 – Evernote and Dropbox"},"content":{"rendered":"

Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve mentioned Evernote<\/a> in two previous posts (here<\/a> and here<\/a>). It and OmniFocus<\/a> (posts here<\/a> and here<\/a>) are two of the three software applications I use most frequently. The third isn\u2019t an application that I use in the traditional sense of \u201cuse.\u201d I don\u2019t start it up and work with it. It\u2019s just always sitting there in the background silently doing its job. \u201cIt\u201d is Dropbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"Most of you are probably familiar with Dropbox. It stores files in the cloud and keeps them synchronized across computers. I have Dropbox installed on my MacBook, my iMac at work, my iMac at home, my iPhone, and my iPad.1<\/a><\/sup> Any file I save to one of my Dropbox folders on one device is automatically to the same folder on other devices.2<\/a><\/sup> That means when I save a document from my MacBook or anywhere else (whether PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, plain text, or Markup) it is (almost) immediately synced to every other device I have. Since I have versions of Word and Excel on my iPhone and iPad as well as on my other computers, it means I can read virtually any document I save on whatever device I\u2019m working with at the moment.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s my key to going paperless to meetings. For meetings I organize, I prepare notes (in plain text or Markup – more on that in next week\u2019s post). For regular meetings (like staff meetings in The Graduate School) that I want to have accessible and easily searchable, I\u2019ll write in Markup and export the result to Evernote using Byword<\/a>. For other meetings, I\u2019ll write in plain text, save the result in an appropriate folder in Dropbox and open the note on my iPad directly.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

The key to all of this is that everything<\/strong> <\/em> I do that\u2019s related to my main duties, Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of The Graduate School, finds its way into an electronic document that\u2019s stored in my \u201cGraduate School\u201d folder in Dropbox. I don\u2019t have to think about syncing. I don\u2019t have to designate one machine or device as the \u201cmother\u201d device on which I work. I can work on any of my devices and have the results accessible from any of them – provided that I have Internet connectivity.<\/p>\n

For my MacBook and iMacs, that\u2019s not a problem. They have local copies of everything. I can work on the local copy even without an Internet connection. Dropbox will upload the results when I\u2019m connected again. If I happen to work on the same file separately, Dropbox will notify me of the conflict and duplicate the file so that nothing is lost.4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Some of the apps I have on my mobile devices can download files from Dropbox into local storage. If I know before I go to a meeting that I\u2019m going to need a particular document, I\u2019ll download it ahead of time – just to make sure I have a copy if there are connectivity problems during the meeting.<\/p>\n

Dropbox isn\u2019t the only way to do this, of course. There\u2019s iCloud (from Apple), OneDrive (from Microsoft), Box, and probably others I don\u2019t know about. I\u2019m not claiming that Dropbox is the best alternative. It\u2019s just the one I\u2019ve been using for 8-10 years, and it works very well for me. There\u2019s a lot more that it can do (including Paper, which I have not investigated), but what I\u2019ve described here are the key functions that I use more than 95% of the time.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. With the latest release of iOS I don\u2019t really need to have Dropbox installed on my iPhone or iPad. The builtin Files application can connect directly to Dropbox. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. It\u2019s a little more subtle than that. You can choose which folders you\u2019d like to sync to any particular device. I\u2019ve chosen not to sync any of my work files to my home iMac, for example. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Since nearly every meeting I go to is associated with work, the Markup files that are exported to Evernote sit in one of my Dropbox folders. I end up with two copies, but that\u2019s OK. Some times it\u2019s easier simply to open the file from Dropbox. Other times it\u2019s easier to open them in Evernote. Either way, I know that they\u2019ll show up in an Evernote search if they\u2019re relevant. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Except for the time I lose reconciling the changes. ↩<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Getting organized in 2018 – links to the series I\u2019ve mentioned Evernote in two previous posts (here and here). It and OmniFocus (posts here and here) are two of the… Read more ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/darwin.eeb.uconn.edu\/uncommon-ground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}