You are running your business and conducting the usual day to day operations when your phone rings and it’s one of your vendors who you contacted earlier and left a voicemail asking for a return call. You ask her a few questions and she responds with more information than you can absorb so you ask her to hold on while you grab a piece of paper to write it down.
You look for a working pen because the first one you grabbed doesn’t write. You can’t find a blank piece of paper so you turn over a piece of mail that had been opened and use that. You start writing and soon find that you are running out of space because envelopes were not designed for taking notes so your print becomes slanted and gets smaller and smaller as you try to keep up with what you are being told. You thank her and tell her to have a nice day and your call ends. A few minutes later an email comes in about an urgent matter that you must attend to immediately so you spend the next hour addressing that issue. After that, a scheduled meeting starts and you finish your day out with the meeting.
The next morning, you remember your conversation with the vendor from yesterday but there is one problem, you have no idea where the used envelope that you scribbled on is located. In fact, you can find every scrap piece of paper, junk mail, magazines, contracts, bubble gum, envelopes with notes from other phone calls and everything else except — that envelope containing the vendors notes. Do you know why that happened? I will tell you. Your business happened and as long as you are in business and your doors are open, it will continue to happen unless you stop.
This cycle plays out in business all the time over and over again like a merry go round at the carnival. How would you like to get off of that merry go round. Image if you could still record the things that you know you won’t remember later and not have to worry about losing that information when you need it. I have good news for you. You can do it and it wont cost you a dime. What is it? It is going paperless and abandoning your paper ways for digital documentation. What is that you ask? It’s quite simple, you can continue to capture your notes but you use digital tools to do it instead. Here are a few options that you can start practicing with today at no cost:
- Evernote – Lets you write, edit, categorize and saves your notes. Free
- Google Docs – Lets you write, edit, categorize and saves your notes. Free
If you really want to get productive combine a tablet computer with your new habit and you can now carry your notes with you eliminating the need to search your office for paper. These will cost you but the return on this investment will be well worth it. Here are a few you can consider in different cost ranges:
- iPad – A portable device that you can write on just like paper $250 and up
- Penultimate app – Allows you to write, edit and save notes. It also connects to Evernote (Above)
- Stylus (Optional) – Feels like a pencil or pen and allows you to write on your tablet. $30.
Note: None of these are affiliate links.
Well, there you have it. You can use these tools to stop writing things down on paper that you lose and save yourself a ton of time and time is money. You owe it to yourself to give this a try. Running a business is hard enough without these little things that kill your time getting in the way. Let me know how this works out for you.
