Stop the Sticky Notes!

Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.

  Career Development   Communications Management   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

A project manager’s desk is often surrounded by sticky notes and scraps of paper with brief reminders and to-do lists from the previous day’s meetings. Alright, I’ll admit I’ve met some project managers with impeccably clean desks. However, my desk is not one of them! I often used Outlook’s Note feature to store information that I wanted to keep once the sticky notes lost their stickiness and became dog-eared and worn pieces of paper. The Outlook solution worked well; however, I quickly found notes I stored in Outlook and notes I stored on my iPhone were not synchronized. I’d have to switch between my mobile phone and my Outlook desktop for the right piece of information. If any of this sounds familiar to you, I think you’ll like my latest productivity suggestion. 

I recently discovered Evernote as my solution to eliminate my “sticky note suffering”. Evernote is a Web-based application that “simply makes it easier to remember...using the computer, phone and the Web.” Evernote has a mobile phone edition and a desktop edition for both PC and Mac users that synchronizes with your own Web-based account. Figure 1 displays Evernote on the desktop.

Figure 1: Evernote

Evernote allows you to capture information everywhere using either your computer or your mobile phone. The creative features and …

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