My Personal Planner (Part 2) – Work Notes

This is part 2 of a 3-part series on my personal planner system. You can read part 1 on how I use my calendar planner here and part 3 on my personal notebook here.

So last month I wrote about my 2013 diary / planner system – how I use the yearly / monthly / weekly calendars to organize my events, schedules and tasks. On this second part I’m blogging about my note-taking system for work matters. I hope some of you find this interesting & useful!

My Work

To give some context, the nature of my work requires me to handle multiple projects at any one time. I’m involved in multiple areas of the company such that I can provide my services to all the internal departments. I also deal with external parties like vendors and agencies. What do I do exactly? My work touch on areas of advertising, brand standards, corporate identity, creatives and communications, product development, product photography and whatever other miscellaneous projects my boss wants me to work on.

So in one typical working day you may see me doing an artwork for advertising insertion we’re doing in a magazine, then liaise with external parties to work on updated product elements (I work for a bedding company, and get involved in things like updating the design of the buttons we use on duvet covers or zipper puller on the pillow protectors), then research for the next topic I’ll be writing on for the company’s monthly blog / newsletter / note, work on designs for a print project, and help the marketing department put together gift boxes for an upcoming event, making sure the gifts are packed according to our packaging standards.

There are times when I’m required to do analyses & reports too, as well as be involved in a smattering of other small / big projects. In summary my work is very varied and ever-changing. Flexible and demanding at the same time. Something I find interesting and don’t get bored of so easily, though quite stressful at times. And I’ve been working for the same company for 5 years now, which is quite an achievement for most people my age considering many jump ship within just one or two years. Haha.

But so much variety requires good organization and this is why I got started with such detailed planning system, which is continually being tweaked and adjusted and improved. That alone is an interesting personal project on its own – one I enjoy doing in my own free time.

The Note-Taking System

So for my work, I make use of two systems: digital and paper. Essentially I keep all my notes digitally because paper takes up space and I don’t want to accumulate shelves and shelves of archived notes from years past. At the same time I recognize the need for a paper notebook for those times when I don’t have any electronic devices readily accessible for note-taking. For when I go out to meetings and it is not yet professionally acceptable to type notes in my mobile phone. Ha! So here’s how I use both systems to keep me sane at work:

EVERNOTE – The faithful and super helpful note-keeper

I LOVE using Evernote. Not only is it available in practically all OS platforms, the program itself is easy to use and there are apps to enhance your user-experience. As of now I have 176 notebooks in my Evernote (and I’ve only started using this last month – what did I say about ever-changing system?) and growing by the day.

Digital means easy tracking, and Evernote comes with several features to help you do that: a search function, tags and stacks. I use the search function for any random searches and when everything else (i.e. my organization system) failed me. Otherwise, I rely mostly on my stacks and tags. Here’s how:

  • In Evernote, the hierarchy goes (from top down): stacks, notebooks, notes. So a notebook contains individual notes and multiple notebooks can be grouped as a stack of notebooks.
  • In general I group my work into several work areas that I use consistently whether in my computer document folders, Evernote, or paper notebook.
  • In Evernote each work area gets assigned a stack.
  • In each stack I have several notebooks for each sub-area of my work. For example, in my “Internal Clients” stack I have a notebook each for every department and in that notebook I have multiple notes for all the things I need to do for that department.
  • In each note, I make use of several tags (5 currently) to indicate: priority level, status (new/open/closed), deadline (I use due months, but for things further ahead I may use quarter year instead, like 2014Q1), whether it is a routine task/project, whether it needs to go into my Master Task List or not (E.g. reference notes are not tasks so they won’t have this “Master Task List” tag). This way all my notes are automatically classified into where they need to go based on tags. And I can easily access those notes under each specific tag or even a combination of tags.
  • Naming convention. I make sure my notes, notebooks and stacks follow a certain nomenclature or naming structure so it allows me to quickly scan through things and get a sense of things rather than having to read through each note title. For now I have all my notes named this way: (status)(due month) MAIN TITLE: Sub Title.
  • Inbox. Evernote has this catch-all notebook where all your notes will go to when you first create them and before assigning them to a specific notebook in your stack. I can’t remember what it’s originally called but the icon is blue (whereas all other notebooks and stacks are green) and I re-named it to “Inbox”. At any time I can go through it and sort those notes. So no worries even when you’re in hurry. You can create your notes first and sort later. But remember to regularly go through and sort. Otherwise, it’ll just be a junk site for all your random notes.
  • Check-box. I love this feature and use it liberally in my notes. I love how I can quickly scroll through notes and spot where the check-boxes are so I don’t miss out on to-dos.
  • Timeline. In all my notes I record what gets done / what happens when. This way I don’t have to search through emails plus my paper notebook plus my files to piece things together. My Evernote notes give me a pretty complete overview.
  • To review my notes, I can either go through each work area (stack) or to any of the tags like my monthly tags to see what items are due this month, or to go to the “open” tag or to my Master List, etc. When I want to feel a sense of accomplishment I’ll go to my “closed” tag where all the notes for all the closed / done projects and tasks are shown. Haha!

I’m going to show you a screenshot of my Evernote layout with some details blurred out. You can see my stacks of notebooks on the left, each expandable to show the notebooks inside, and the list of tags right underneath that.

The bottom left section shows how my individual notes typically look like, with TO DOs at the top and TIMELINE underneath.

PAPER NOTEBOOK.

As part of my 3-book planner I carry around in my bag, I have one notebook dedicated for work notes. I use it for mainly two purposes: meeting notes and references (e.g. what are the Pantone uncoated / coated / TCX / hexadecimal / CMYK / RGB of my company’s corporate colors and product colors??? I have those reference notes there. Hahaha.).

Other than trying to keep things as consistently as possible, I also use content pages and page numbers. This is very useful when not using a binder system and you can’t simply move pages to different sections.

In summary, here’s how my paper notebook works:

  • Write down page numbers on the bottom outside corner of the paper.
  • Have one content page for each work area. So just like in my Evernote stacks, I have content page for Internal Clients, Brand & Corporate Identity, etc. Each work area gets assigned a 3-digit code. So Internal Clients = INT, etc.
  • I start each new note with a date and title. And can you guess it… the title starts with those 3-digit codes! For example: “INT – ……”. I then write down the title and page number on the appropriate content page so I can easily go to the content page for a specific work area to search for notes that way.
  • I also use tabs on the side to indicate each month so I can quickly flip to a specific month if I’m searching based on dates.
  • I alternate writing notes in blue or black ink (no wild colors cos it’s for work after all!), plus I highlight the date and title for each note so I can tell very clearly where each note starts and ends.
  • How this links to my Evernote: whenever I’m updating my Evernote, I’ll put a reference to those handwritten notes. For example: “10 Sep 2013: Meeting with xxx, refer to notes “(title note here)” on pg xx”. This way the master notes in my Evernote have complete timelines for every single project / task I’m supposed to do. When there are to-do’s from my handwritten notes, I’ll transfer those to Evernote and use the checkbox of course!

If you’ve read this far, thank you for taking the time to do so! You can now rest your eyes for a bit and see something more fun (I hope): some photos of my work notebook! Hahaha…

The front decorated with some silly photos & a nice note from my bosses…

See those monthly little red tabs on the side? If you compare it to some photos on my “My Personal Planner (Part 1)” post, you’ll see I no longer have unruly looking tabs poking out of my planner! =pOh the first page is a diagram on GTD (Getting Things Done). You can Google it if you want to find out more about the system. It gives me a good guideline though I don’t follow it strictly.

Anyway if you think this is too much to handle, I don’t blame you. Not many will go through so much hassle to get everything organized, tracked and visible. But so long as it helps me keep moving forward in life and at work, this is at least a healthier expression of my OCD tendencies. =)

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