If you’ve made it this far, you’ve captured what you need to do and set up a system to help you actually do it. But what about those odds and ends that you may need to revisit? Those little doodles, emails, handouts, or reference documents that you are just certain you’ll need agan?

As I indicated up front, I have untrained myself from the old habit of scribbling notes during meetings. Instead, I capture things that need to be done; actions that need to be taken. Yet I still find myself staring at piles of stuff that may need a home for some unforeseen time in the future when someone might ask me for it. Old meeting agendas, handouts, memos from the district, and the like.

For me, stuff like this breaks down into two basic categories:

Electronic Stuff

• Emails with information that may not be immediately important but may be important later. Dates for trainings for teacher mentors, for instance. I don’t need it now, but may need it when an interested teacher approaches me about mentoring.
• Other important documents you may need access to later. We have an emergency phone tree at my school, for example. Or maybe you got a PDF of a workshop registration attached to an email.
• PDFs or other articles you keep meaning to read. I receive a lot of publications via email. Many of them are compilations of articles from around the web and there are always a few I’d like to read at some magical point in the future, “when I have the time.”

Evernote has become my digital dumping ground. Enough has been written about Evernote that I’m not going to spend a lot of time on what it does or how it works, rather I’m going to share with you how I make it work for me.

I keep a few notebooks for various purposes. I try to keep stuff that is work-related in its own notebook. In my “LHS Reference” notebook, you’ll find math content standards and frameworks, an emergency phone tree, and a list of important district phone numbers.  If I see an article I like, I ask Firefox to print it as a PDF and dump the PDF into my “Articles & Papers” notebook. Receipts for, well, anything get dumped into “Receipts” and anything without a clearly defined place goes into “Random Stuff.”

I recommend starting with one giant notebook and letting things happen organically. For instance, I think I’m going to have another notebook eventually called “Recipes” where I save recipes I come across online.

Non-Electronic Stuff

For stuff that doesn’t exist in electronic format (handouts, whiteboards from great brainstorming sessions, completed classroom observation instruments, etc), my first question is usually whether I can get it into electronic format (and whether I’d want to). One of these days I’ll get a Fujitsu ScanSnap, but until then I have a few other tricks up my sleeve.

“For handouts, I ask the hander-outer if they can email a copy to me or, “Put it on the wiki.” If it’s an Office document – or anything non-PDF – I’ll turn it into a PDF (this functionality is trivial on a Mac). For whiteboards I’ll shoot a picture or two with my iPhone. Both the PDFs and digital images can get dumped into Evernote where it will happily scan all the legible text and make even digital pictures of my whiteboard searchable.

But, alas, there are some things that just don’t make the jump to digital. For instance, I don’t have the time or the need to scan all the data-collection instruments I use for classroom observations. I have a folder for each teacher I evaluate and the instruments go in there. Once I complete a summative evaluation, I usually shred the instruments and move on.

As I mentioned in my very first post in this series, I don’t keep a lot of random stuff in hard copy format if I can avoid it. Having reference items in Evernote makes them easy to search and access if and when I need them.

Putting it together

We’ve come a long way from capture, to action, to filing away stuff you may need to get your hands on at some future time. Regardless of the system you put in place for yourself, make sure it’s something you can stick with and that it becomes a transparent part of your daily routine. The less you have to think about it the better.

By spending some time up front deciding how you plan to capture, act, and file you can free up your valuable time for other things. Plus you’ll feel less stressed because you’ll know you have at least some of your world under control.

Previously

• Part 1
• Part 2