Let's get down to business

To defeat procrastination

Welcome to 2020, reporters! Hope you missed me. Like many of you, I’m currently working on a new year wave of motivation to get more organized.

I usually don’t share productivity tools on here, because there are just so many, and they depend so heavily on the unique contours of your own brain. But I got a nice email request before the break, so with the help of this incredible tweet, let’s give it a try.

I use Evernote, a heavy hitting Swiss Army Knife of a tool. I use it to keep track of sprawling investigative stories, where I can file by publisher, story, date, type of content (interview/data/previous coverage/etc) and more. I’ve also written about Evernote as an impressive mobile scanner.

Frankly, I don’t think anyone is that interested in the extensive details of my Evernote setup, so here is a quick roundup:

• If you use Microsoft Office (like you get your emails on Outlook), try OneNote

• If you’re keeping track of very complex stories, try Evernote

• If you’re keeping balls in the air, but those balls are not super complicated, try Trello

• If you’re getting a team organized, try Asana

And that doesn’t even wade in to the swamp of To Do list apps…

My biggest recommendation is to try these tools for a couple weeks before giving up. Tweak it as much as you want, and the tool will adapt to you. If you still don’t like it after about 3 weeks, move on. Good luck with your resolutions, reporters!