The Column
Motto: So Much to Do and so Little Time
Writing Columns is something I do for fun. Unfortunately, there isn’t much time left for fun in my days lately. Dear reader(s) please forgive me for what will be a relatively quiet month here on this blog… for I have entered attack mode.
I am calling it “attack mode” because framing it that way is better for morale than framing it as “Wake up. Prepare for work. Work on work stuff. Lunch (during which I usually work). Work on work stuff. Go home. Cook. Work on administrative stuff. Eat. Work on wedding stuff. Sleep. Repeat… sometimes adding in a trip to the gym.” Attack Mode sounds much better. As a policy, I don’t talk about work on the Column. For the purposes of this post it will suffice just to say that I come home at the end of the day stressed out, which is new. Wedding work is killer, but at least I’m motivated. I’m still angry that there isn’t a platform that truly fits my notetaking & project planning/implementation needs, but I’ve made Google Drive work pretty well so far. Microsoft OneNote would have been alright, but that’s not what we used. Partially because the experience has historically sucked outside of the native windows client… and I don’t want to develop any more dependencies on using Windows as my OS. Evernote was close, but still lacks some really fundamentally important features. No spreadsheets? Seriously? I’m not going to write out my own CSV file on a rich text editor. I’ve thought about the problem of notetaking and project management suites time and time again. I know and have tried all of the major players. What’s frustrating is that every solution has ~6 of my 10 requirements for the perfect notetaking/project tracking suite. They are all great in their own ways, but then fail in some vital areas. For the picture to go out on, I made this chart (on my Chromebook):
You could argue for and against a lot of the checkmarks I left off there and put on there, respectively… but I’ll stand by my chart.
Top 10: Requirements of the Perfect Notetaking/Project Tracking Suite
10. Linkable notebooks, both from within and without. Related, the ability to have notes open to public view. 9. No practical limits on storage or bandwidth. 8. Scalability from tens of notes to thousands. 7. Ubiquity from a 24 inch monitor to a 4 inch iPhone screen. Web and native clients across all major platforms with feature parity. 6. Individual and collaborative use with a clear delineation between the two. Both experiences should be consistent with one another and work together intelligently. 5. Timeline and gallery views. Timeline should incorporate filters and different views. See notes by date created. See notes by custom date field. See only a specific set of notes (say, notes tagged as “event” or something). Gallery view shows the photos and the related metadata (similar to a Pinterest interface). 4. Calendar & email integration 3. Customizable, searchable, sortable metadata fields with optional addition of tags for each entry. 2. Entries of various type - including formatted text, spreadsheets, pictures, audio, and video, at a minimum. 1. The ability to create password-protected, securely encrypted notes on a note-by-note basis.
Quote:
“Women that break up with me. If you dump me, that’s it. It’s over.”
- Redditor captainmagictrousers telling people what a dealbreaker for him is -