Digital Organization

I received a phone call about an order we placed in April, 2019. We are restoring the interior of a 1962 Oldsmobile F85 Cutlass. We discussed all the components needed and thought everything was ordered with the company out West.

The pieces are finally arriving a year later and we do not have carpet. We discussed carpet when ordering the interior. It was a lengthy discussion because I considered going with a different color from the original. In the end, we stayed with the original pile and color. How did this happen? It happened because at the time the order was placed I was in the final stages of our annual show. I quickly reviewed the three separate invoices and I missed that the carpet was not on any one of them. Fast forward to today, I needed to find the orders/invoices. I occasionally digitally filed paperwork, not all of it in its proper place. I see now there are a lot of papers that need to be stored in a better place for easy retrieval.  

This made me realize the importance of digital organization. I have worked on this for years. One of the many challenges is the form of the digital organization. Do I use folders online, platforms like Evernote and Dropbox. Do I depend on cloud storage, should there be an external hard drive or flash drive that contains the information? 

I am not alone in this. We have information at our fingertips. This is both a blessing and a curse. We can get answers in an instant and this creates a need for instant gratification. It speeds everything up and leaves little time to put things in their proper place. It creates an “I will get to that later” mindset. 

The blog posts this week will feature each digital option; the features and benefits of each one. If there is a particular topic you would like to see covered in depth, please comment below.