February 1, 2010 Comments Off
We’ve just released a really nifty update. As of approximately 7 and a half minutes ago, Home Document Manager supports tagging as a way of organizing your documents. As any of you who use Gmail, Evernote, Zoho etc will know – folders are good, tags are great, but folders + tags is the business! Any of you familiar with GTD’s action tags or Covey Roles will already be familiar with the power of tags.
What is a tag?
A tag can be anything you want it to be. You can create tags corresponding to your project, your workflow, or how you like to organise your tasks. Tags are hierarchical, and completely free form. The important difference between Tags and folder is that tags are not mutually exclusive. A document can be in only 1 folder, but can have any number of tags. The image on the left is just an example of how you could organise your tags.
You can browse your documents with each tag in much the same way as you do with folders. Just click on the tag.
When documents appear in the document list, any tags they have will be displayed underneath their icons (shown left). Using tags is a great way add a little GTD to your paperwork. It certainly saves having papers sitting round with post-it notes stuck on them.
This is very much the beginning of Home Document Manager’s affair with tagging. There are a lot of other tag-oriented features on the roadmap. It’s an important new feature, so your feedback is really valuable.
As usual, no action is required on your part to receive this update. Home Document Manager will update itself whenever an Internet connection is present.
January 24, 2010 Comments Off
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for new features here. Today, we’ve published an update which significantly improves the import and export capabilities of Home Document Manager. You have always had the option of importing and exporting files via the Import and Export buttons in the Ribbon, but now you can import/export entire directory folder structures in one fell swoop.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a short video should be the equivalent of an encyclopedea. Perhaps not. But anyway, here is a video of the new import features. You can also now export entire directories by simply right clicking on a folder and selecting ‘export’.
As usual, no action is required, Home Document Manager will update itself when an Internet connection is present.
February 19, 2009 Comments Off
I love finding new uses for Home Document Manager, and I’m always intrigued to find out what our users are, well, using it for. A few weeks ago, I caught one of my guinea pig users (a friend) using it to organize her cooking recipes. She’s forever cutting out recipes from magazines and had previously stored them in a tin box. An aesthetically pleasing tin box, but a tin box nonetheless.
Despite my protests that it was never intended for use with recipes, she persisted, and it actually worked pretty well. She was able to organize them into folders and subfolders, and she could search through the documents to find similar recipes. For example, searching for ‘risotto’, returns a list of recipes for risotto dishes. Even more interesting, if she had, say some chicken, leek and peppers that needed using up, she can search for “chicken leek pepper” and find all recipes that would uses these ingredients.
She has a small, oldish laptop that she can put on a kitchen worktop when she wants, but be careful if you’re putting your brand new $2000 tablet on the same surface as food/oil/water/fire.
February 17, 2009 Comments Off
I appreciate paperless zealotry as much as the next scanner/shredder devotee. But try as I might, there are always some things that just work better as paper. This raises the question of what should be done with it. Whatever it is, it needs to be lightweight and very accessible.
I came across a post on Unclutterer today entitled “Creating a central binder for your home”
with just such a solution. If you go down this path, I would recommend sticking to the 5 categories as an upper limit. I think anything more and you’re on the slippery slope to paper clutter.
I think that any paper document should consider its existence as a privilege, not a right, so a periodical review of the wallet’s contents would be a good idea.
