I've been keeping it a secret. I didn't want to tell everyone before I was sure I could succeed at this..... I am proud to say that I have been paperLESS for the past 90 days!
If you've been reading my blog for very long, or if you know me personally, you know that about twice a year I go through a phase where I decide to put my Franklin Planner on the shelf, in an attempt to go paperless. The phase generally doesn't last more than a week. Until now.
I was having lunch with a friend of mine in the middle of last year and he went on and on about the perils of paper-based planning. He told me how I could lose my planner and all the notes and info I had written inside it would be compromised. I scoffed at him and said, "I've been carrying a planner since 1994 and I have NEVER misplaced it." Well, wouldn't you know it, I wound up forgetting my planner and leaving it in the restaurant that very day. How ironic.... You can imagine how embarrassed I was to tell my friend, "Umm...Can you please stop the car? I left my planner at the restaurant...."
Freaked out by the "Miss Cleo-like" accuracy of my friend's wise counsel, I decided that I would try, yet again, to go paperless.
He actually taught me a pretty cool system. I don't think he has patented it, so I'll share it with you. Basically, he carries a reporter's notebook with him, because it is impossible to go 100% paperless (Hence the term "PaperLESS," as opposed to "PaperNONE"). The notebook is awesome because it is the perfect size to fit in the map compartment in your car door, the back pocket of jeans and/or dress pants, as well as a perfect fit when you hold it with one hand and write with the other.
He'll take notes throughout the day at meetings and such, and then transcribe the notes into Outlook later on. Then the page gets torn out of the notebook and shredded. Outlook is synched with the Blackberry, and both are password-protected AND encrypted. So even if the reporter's notebook gets lost, the only info compromised is 1 day's worth of notes, as opposed to the 3 months+ that I was carrying around in my planner. What's even cooler, since the notes have been synched with the Blackberry, all the text now becomes search-able, which is way better than dealing with reference binders and paper indexes in a paper-based planning system.